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Databases

What is Google Scholar?

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. You can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.
The library databases however are selected to support the programs of study at ECA.
Google Scholar has scholarly (not necessarily peer-reviewed) papers, which may or may not be free to access.

Why using Library databases may be a better choice than using Google Scholar.
Library Databases Google Scholar
• Provide the ability to focus search by subject area.      • Does not have the ability to focus search by subject area.
• Allow users to sort results according to date and relevance.  • Does not have an easy way to sort articles in your results list.
• Allow users to sort results by type of material  (academic journal, magazine, newspaper, etc). • Does not clearly specify what type of material (academic journal, magazine, newspaper, etc) is in the results list.
• Contain the ability to limit searches by a variety of criteria • Does not have full criteria to limit your search results.
• Will never charge you for the full text of an article if the HCC Library has a subscription to that database • Provides full text of some electronic articles but is not as helpful in tracking down print articles. Some articles may be available for a fee.

Example of Google Scholar Search results

An available pdf is indicated by the [PDF] link on the right-hand side. Limiting options such as publication date range are on the left-hand side.

Google Scholar allows you to :

  • Save your citations
  • Cite the information source
  • View articles which have cited the article
  • View related articles
  • View different versions of the article

Google Scholar Guide PDF

Google scholar Button

  • The Google Scholar Button is a browser extension that enables easy access to full-text articles from any web page. 
  • The extension is available for Chrome, Edge and Firefox. 
  1. Visit Google Scholar
  2. Go to the menu at the top left corner of the screen
  3. Select Settings
  4. On the next screen, select Button
  5. Click on Install Scholar Button to look up papers as you browse
  6. You will be taken to the site enabling you to install the browser extension
  7. Follow the steps on the site to complete the installation

Alternatively, click on the appropriate icon below to install the extension to your browser:

Chrome icon Get it for Chrome

Edge icon Get it for Edge

Firefox icon Get it for Firefox

  1. Highlight keywords, citations, article titles, or authors on any webpage
  2. Click the Google Scholar Button in your browser 
  3. You can open the results in a separate tab using the [ ] button or selct one of the search results listed
  4. Or Save the article to MyLibrary to read or cite it later. Press the blue star below the result to save it, or the grey star at the bottom of the page to see all saved articles

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