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Using Google Scholar
Google Scholar crawls (indexes) the content of publishers' websites, scholarly journals, indexes, academic websites, institutional repositories, etc. to find information of a scholarly nature. Many of the "hits" returned by Google Scholar are for resources that are not free but are available only by subscription or pay-pay-view.
The John Jay Library already has paid for subscriptions to many of the resources you may find on Google Scholar. By entering Google Scholar through the links on this page, you will be using the Library's proxy server and will be identified as a John Jay user even if you are off campus. In most cases, if the Library has purchased access to the articles you wish to view, you will find the notation "Find JJ Fulltext" next to the citation. Click on this link to get to the familiar CUNY FindIt! page where you will be able to (hopefully) link directly to the article. Note: Linking from Google Scholar is not as accurate as from our subscribed databases.*
Enter Google Scholar now
Enter Advanced Scholar Search
Notes on using Google Scholar:
- Scholar crawls the web content of most, but not all major publishers. Among those missing, as of July, 2005, are Elsevier, the American Chemical Society, and the American Psychological Association.
- Scholar seems to work better for finding the most significant articles than for finding the newest. Search results on Google Scholar are ranked by factors including where the search words appear and how often a work has been cited. Therefore, works that have been cited numerous times will appear near the top of a list. Newer works, which have not yet been cited, will appear near the bottom.
- Since Scholar searches all subject fields at once, and since the same word may have different meanings in different fields, search results may contain an unacceptable amount of "noise."
- It is not clear to what extent Google Scholar is searching institutional repositories, which provide free access to the scholarly output of the researchers of the institution. Comprehensive crawling of these sites would provide access to material not easily available elsewhere.
*For reasons known only to Google, some citations will correctly say "Find JJ Fulltext" but then will fail to link to the fulltext on the FindIt! page. Other citations will not have the "Find JJ Fulltext" notation even though we do have online access. Double check the Sealy Library's List of Full Text Electronic Journals to avoid paying pay-per-view charges.
