Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, 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 helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research. [About Google Scholar]
It's pros include it's size and scope, interdisciplinarity, and citation tools. It's cons include it's size, lack of disciplinarity, and lack of human touch on both the selection of contents and descriptive metadata. It is also reliant on what it finds online, so it can have significant gaps in citations and full text for information that was created midcentury or that exists only in print.
it is an additional tool that you can use, but not exclusively, to find scholarly information.
Google Scholar Settings - your library:
IF you choose to log into Google Scholar (with your personal account or a separate one that you create for research) you can add UVic Libraries under Settings, and then it will link you to UVic Library holdings and prompt you for UVic Authentication... otherwise you will be subject to paywalls, full text may be unavailable, and you won't know what you have access to read. These links appear beside the articles alongside links to open source texts.
For books, you need to open the 'more' arrows under the citation, to see a UVic link that will search our book catalogues to find that book (in any format):
Also see in the examples above, where it shows 'Cited by'? this allows you to follow the author's ideas forward in time, by seeing who has cited it and for what purpose. You can also track ideas back in time by following the citations inside a work, but this allows you to view the idea travelling forward in time and further developing, being challenged or accepted, and built upon. It is not a complete record, as it's drawing this data from other items in its database, but it is one clue that a scholar can follow.
Ask us