According to Google, "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 has their own search algoritms that are somewhat of a mystery. They claim that they rank results by "weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature."
However, the very breadth of Google Scholar is its weakness as well as its strength. Do you want to pull up college term papers and odd semi-scholarly bits and pieces, or do you want to identify and read solid academic (peer-reviewed) journal articles? If the former, then Google Scholar is worth using. If the latter, you will be better served by our academic databases....even if you have to search multiple files.
One word about Google Scholar. If you want to be able to link to and access content indexed by Google within our databases, be sure to use the tool via OUR LINK, which runs through our proxy server and allows for IP authentication or off-campus login. It is available through the search widget to the lower right of this guide page. The basic Suffolk Google Scholar link looks like this:
http://0-scholar.google.com.library.law.suffolk.edu/
For simple Cited Reference searching, see below. In addition, interested scholars might want to look into a new Google tool, still in development, called Google Scholar Citations. For more on this, see this blog entry.
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First, find the article for which you want to do citation tracking. For best results, click the Advanced Search on the Google Scholar homepage for better options.
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Here's a sample search to track that specific article:
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In the resulting search results page, the article I want is right on top, and you see the number of cited references indicated. Click that link to explore them. Note, too, that I also retrieved a couple of related publications by Trivers and even a bad cite with typos in it that was also cited twice!
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with Sawyer Library Full-Text Links