Google Scholar: find that elusive information

Google Scholar has been a firm favourite with staff and students in DCU since it launched.

I’ve found it really useful for retrieving information about Ireland and the Irish language for example. Quite often I’ve found results on Scholar (preprints, conference papers) that I just couldn’t seem to access any other way.

Using a clever filtering system (we don’t need to get into the complicated algorithms here!) , it filters out the commercial results from searches and gives us another way to access full text scholarly journals, conference proceedings, preprints and books.

Handy features include cited by rankings and related searches. So, if you do find that elusive article that gives you the information you’ve been tearing your hair out to find, the cited by rankings can quickly and simply link you to other relevant documents.

The cited by rankings are a fantastic feature which have proved extremely popular.

Also important to point out is the fact that Google Scholar will link you to full-text articles available via the Library’s databases! (see our earlier blog piece on how to set this feature up on your home PC)

Have you used Google Scholar to find information you couldn’t get elsewhere?
Let us know!

Aisling McDermott, Subject Librarian Fiontar