Google announces Google Scholar, a search tool which, in Google’s words, “enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.”

How does it work? Go to Google Scholar at http://scholar.google.com/, and enter a search such as salmon “endangered species act”. Your results will include links to full-text articles in journals and online that you may or may not have access to. If you are on-campus, and the library has a subscription to that publisher, you will generally be able to access the article.

If nothing else, Google Scholar has now provided you a citation to with which to work. UConn faculty and students can gain access – online or in print – to many of these articles by turning to our eJournal Locator.

Results come in two flavors: Direct links to articles and links to articles in which your search was cited.

Find out more:

SearchEngineWatch provides this nice introduction to the service, laying out its features, limitations, and how it breaks barriers to the “invisible web”

The New York Times tells you more in this article, Google Plans New Service for Scientists and Scholars (reg. req’d)

ResourceShelf has a rich introduction to the service

Source: ResourceShelf