What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar provides a simple way to search broadly for scholarly and peer-reviewed literature. From one search box, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar is also a very good source of conference papers and proceedings.
As of March 2015, Wikipedia reported that approximately 160 million documents were indexed by Google Scholar. Coverage of topics in Google Scholar varies from discipline to discipline as many journal publishers do not allow Google to index their articles; in many cases searching subject specific databases will result in a better choice of articles.
If you are searching with Google Scholar on-campus you will automatically be given access to articles for which TMU has a subscription. If you are using Google Scholar off-campus, you will need to configure Google Scholar to get access to those articles.
Configuing Google Scholar for off-campus use
For Google Scholar to know that you are affiliated with TMU (and give you access to TMU resources), you will need to configure your Google Scholar Preferences as follows:
- Go to Google Scholar and click on the Settings icon
- Choose Library Links from the left-hand menu
- Enter Toronto Metropolitan University in the search box
- Click in the box beside Toronto Metropolitan University - Check TMU Libraries
- Scroll down and click on the Save preferences button
Once configured, you will see Check TMU Libraries links when you search Google Scholar and you will have access to all TMU's subscription resources.
Google Scholar Chrome Extension
Chrome users can install the Google Scholar Button to make finding articles and formating citations easy. You can use it to:
- Find full text of articles
- Re-do your web search on Google Scholar
- Format references in APA, MLA or Chicago style and copy them into your paper.
To take full advantage of the Google Scholar Button when off-campus, remember to configure your Google Scholar settings so that it knows you are from TMU and provides access to TMU subscribed resources.