Not Your Ordinary Database
Google Scholar allows you to conduct a keyword search of many scholarly publications across a wide range of disciplines. Scholar concentrates on searching the abstract of articles and the cited references both from the article and too the article and available full texts of books and patents.
Google Scholar differs in many ways from the other scholarly databases. MSOE owns access to many databases such as EBSCOHost’s Academic Search and ProQuest’s Applied Science & Technology Abstracts (Applied Sci/Tech). In a scholarly database, a lot of information about every article is indexed in fields such as author, title, date of publication, journal and subject heading. Subject headings are uniform terms that a database uses to describe the article, for example, articles about American cars may have the subject heading “Autos-American made.” Articles that use the terms Ford, domestic cars, Detroit auto industry, etc, will all fall under this category. With keyword searching, the database will only look for the exact word you use and it may miss out on articles that are in the same subject, but do not use the exact words. Another that Google Scholar differs from these databases is that there is no quantitative list of the journals and dates covered. The spider is continually crawling and indexing more articles and the database is always growing.
Scholar is a good place to start out when gathering scholarly material. You don’t need to be aware of the subject headings of a particular database; you can dive right into the search by typing in any keywords. Google searches for articles that contain those keywords and lists them for you. The results may come from books, patents or articles. Beginning a search is easy in Scholar, but you will soon find that it gets hairy.
Limitations of Scholar
Pretend you are doing a project about deaths
from firearms. If you type in the query- firearms death-
all the results will contain these words. What if the author
uses the term murder, killings or fatalities? You may not
see these articles. If you use the synonym operator (~),
you will get more results, but since Google does not allow you
to view their thesaurus, you can’t be sure what all the synonyms
for death are. Say you would like to further limit the results to
include only deaths of minors. You can add minors to the search, but
if the author preferred the term adolescent or children, the results
would not list these articles. Scholar does allow you to limit
by date range and author, but not be type of material- book, patent or
journal- or by particular journal. Databases that use controlled vocabulary allow you too view all
the articles on a particular topic, whether or not the
terms exactly match the subject heading.