Connecting University of Regina Archer Library to Google Scholar

Connecting University of Regina Archer Library to Google Scholar. Connect to the Library homepage at:

https://library.uregina.ca

Click on the “Databases” tab.  Under “Find database by title” type “Google Scholar”, and click “find”.

That leads to the screen below.

The information under Notes is crucial if you want to search Scholar using a computer located anywhere off-campus.  The University Library subscribes to more than 80,000 electronic journals. Your Scholar search will often find articles published in those journals. But if you are searching from off-campus, the publisher websites will not know that you are one of our students and have the right to read those articles.  Instead, you’ll be asked to pay for them. To avoid that problem, click on How to Set Google Scholar Preferences , shown highlighted above, and make the minor changes described after you have connected to the Scholar search page. You may also want to watch our video tutorial on setting your Google Scholar preferences. Then, you’ll have no problems accessing our subscriptions in your Scholar results.

Also read: How to Create a Google Scholar Profile

To connect to the Google Scholar search page, click on its title on the “databases” screen.

 How to set up UR Library on Google Scholar

Changing Google Scholar Settings for Off-Campus Access

Google Scholar is a great way to do multidisciplinary research. However, many of the results in Google
Scholar exist behind a paywall meaning that while you are able to see the abstract and some of the
metadata you will not be able to read the article. In other cases you will have access to a prepublication version located at the author’s institution but you will not be able to see the final published
copy.

One way to better access these journals is to do it through your library’s subscriptions. If you are
on campus, and accessing the library through the campus internet, this process is automatic and
seamless. However, if you are off campus (or for example on campus using cell phone data) you will not
have access to the library’s resources through Google Scholar unless you follow these five simple steps. Read More

Searching Google Scholar

Group Project Topic:    

                        In recent years, there has been much discussion of “weapons of mass destruction”,

                        including biological warfare. During World War 2, Great Britain conducted experiments

                        with anthrax spores on a small offshore island called Gruinard. In your project report,

                        examine and discuss the following aspects related to those experiments –

                                    Describe the experiments and their results.

                                    Were there any impacts on British military/political policies?                    

                                    Were there any ecological or environmental impacts?

                                    How were any such impacts remedied?

                                    Was there ever any proof that two of the Axis powers [Germany/Japan] used

                                    biological weapons such as anthrax?

Concept Map Review:

E X P A N D E D    C O N C E P T S

Gruinard                    Anthrax           experiment*      result*        ecolog*                politic*

                                  Anthracis                                                    environment*       militar*

R E L A T E D   C O N C E P T

Anthrax                 German*       “world war”

Anthracis               Japan*

Is There Relevant Material On Google Scholar?   

Start as before with a general search  –

gruinard    ( anthrax  OR  anthracis )

Remember that Google automatically and invisibly inserts the word AND between   Gruinard  and the set of brackets which follows.

The command word OR must be in capital letters.

Note:  When using Scholar, you DO need to use (…..brackets…..)  to group words describing a concept.

Google Scholar will interpret this search to mean –

Find all records containing the word    Gruinard.

Find all records containing the words  anthrax  or  anthracis  or  both words.

Keep all records which contain both concepts :   Gruinard   and also   anthrax/anthracis.

The search retrieves over 800 records, including books/journal articles/government documents/conference papers, and other good – quality materials.  A few sample records are shown below. This very general search gives good results on what the Gruinard experiments were, and also information on the effects of those tests.

How can you get to the full – text of these documents?

How Google Scholar Searches

Google Scholar does not search in exactly the same way as the “academic” databases described under the preceding tab.

Truncation:

The Library catalogue and academic databases use something called a truncation symbol to retrieve various endings on a word “stem”.  The Library catalogue uses a ? question mark. Most academic databases use a star or asterisk   *.   Thus, as indicated earlier –

japan*    would find records containing the words   japan/japan’s/japanese.

german*   would find   german/german’s/germans/germany/ Germanic.

Automatic stemming:  

Google Scholar doesn’t recognize truncation symbols. Instead, it uses automatic stemming, and looks for the word you type in, plus any additional letters on the end of that word. To work properly, what you type in must be a complete word, not a truncated one such as societ. As an example,

military would find the words military/military’s , but not militarism/militaristic.

Psychology would not also retrieve psychological/psychologically/psychologist.

Because you can’t use truncation symbols, you may need to type in those additional variations of your search terms.

Scholar now does appear to search automatically for synonyms related to the words in your search strategy.

But the results are often erratic.

Exact Word Searching

By default Google looks for the synonyms of your search word.  So if you want to search for library Google will also search for librarian.  The best strategy for shutting off this feature is to put words in quotation marks ” “.  So back to our prior example: searching for library will also bring back librarian, while searching for “library” will only return results for library.

Automatic Insertion of the Boolean Command Word  AND : 

Scholar automatically inserts the word  AND  between every word/phrase/set of brackets unless you deliberately type in the word OR instead.

Capitalization of the Boolean command word  OR  :  

If you use the command word OR it must be in capital letters so that Scholar will understand it is a command, not just another word to search for.