Google Scholar: Searching Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a useful resource in the following scenarios...

• Search for information from not only peer-reviewed journal articles but other "grey literature" formats such as theses, conference papers, government reports etc.
• Searches across multiple subject specialties, expanding into social sciences and multidisciplinary areas

But remember...

• Google Scholar will not always find everything you need, it may miss some "gold standard" articles
• A bibliographic database such as Medline or CINAHL can provide more proximate searching, particularly if you are looking at certain study designs.
• Google Scholar can provide irrelevant results which may be more time-consuming in your research efforts.

And always....

• Check with the librarian email library@cabrini.com.au to provide helpful tips on searching and which resources are best.

Step 1

Log in with your personal Google Account, this is the account you will use for other Google software such as GMAIL. 

Step 2

In the top left hand corner, click on the menu bar symbol.

Select the Settings Link and select Library Links

Step 3

Type in the word Cabrini and search, the result of Cabrini Health will display, please check box to select.

Step 4

Search for results in Google Scholar, if Cabrini has a link to that title, you will see the words CLICK ON FULL TEXT  

When this link is selected, the record will be displayed in the library search with various links to fulltext access.

Search Tips

 https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html#searching provides further information on doing basic searching.

Specifically look at the examples for searching via a title, an author and how to customise your results by date range.

Searching by study design

E.g. juvenile arthritis AND methotrexate AND intitle:systematic reviews

This search formula may not always be precise as the name of the study design may be indexed in the abstract, but in most cases a study design such as a systematic review will be indexed in the title or sub-title.  When using the field index intitle it will retrieve the most relevant results.

Adding records to My Library

This link https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html#library provides further information on how to set up a "library" and retain your selected articles.  Under each record from your resulting search click on the Save link.  A popup box titled Saved to my library will appear.

Note : Records can only be exported one at a time, unlike a database which can export multiple citations.