Benefits

• Find material that does not show up when you search VC/UHV Library materials
• Covers a wide range of academic disciplines
• Can help you identify journals or authors connected to a particular topic
• Search results provide information on books and articles in one search
• Will help you find full citation information
  

Drawbacks

• Not meant to replace the library catalog, reference material or electronic databases available through the VC/UHV Library website
• Only searching Google Scholar will cause you to miss out on information that is important to your research
• Full text is not widely available so VC/UHV Library resources must be used to retrieve the full text
• Everything indexed in Google Scholar is not scholarly material
• Cannot limit your search research like you can with library resources

Google Scholar is another tool that can be used to help you research. It is a way to search for material such as articles, theses, books, abstracts, court opinions, technical reports, patents and many other document types. You still need to evaluate the sources you find in Google Scholar because not everything is scholarly material.

The Advanced Search feature will allow you to search by author's last name and publication title. It will allow you to limit your results for articles published within the specified years or articles in a specific subject area. Google Scholar will not allow you to sort your results by publication date.

Not every document will be available with full text in Google Scholar, however, you can use the VC/UHV Library to link to or find full text. Before you can link to the full text, you must set your Google Scholar Preferences.