Google is a large search engine that most people use in their everyday lives. Not many people think of using it in their research, but there are several components that make it useful to today's health science professionals. Google can be an excellent source in finding research materials. It can also be an effective tool for researching and finding scholarly materials, but it is certainly not a replacement for using Library databases and subscriptions. Alumni and visitors to this site can use Google to find full-text articles and books that they can use in their research.
This guide is a companion to the Google for Researchers workshop hosted by the Health Sciences Library. If you have any questions, please email Annabelle Holt. You can view our scheduled workshops on the Library's Workshop Calendar.
Google Scholar is a search engine that specializes in searching scholarly literature and academic resources. While Google will return information contained in any website, Google Scholar limits its searching to just academic literature resources, including .edu sites. It is freely accessible, like Google, and can be very helpful to researchers. If this guide doesn't answer your questions, you may Ask a Librarian or read more about Google Scholar.
Google Scholar does not have the same features as most databases do, leading it to be not as helpful in limiting or narrowing your search. Google Scholar is great for many things, including:
Google Scholar has the ability to link to your Library resources here at the Health Sciences Library. Setting up Library Links means Google Scholar will link to full text Library resources if we have access to it. These links will appear on the right side of your screen, and it will cut down on your search time for full-text as a UTHSC affiliate. Alumni and non-affiliates will not have this feature. For more information on how you can research as an alumni or non-affiliate, please check out our Alumni Information and Links Guide.
How to set up Library Links in Google Scholar:
NOTE: This is already set up on all campus computers, so this is not something you will have to do if you use a computer on campus.
Google Scholar, like many other databases, allows users to import resources from the database to EndNote and other citation management softwares. This saves researchers time and allows for the integration of Google Scholar into your research process. You can import resources into your citation management software in two different ways. First, you may click on the quotation marks beneath the resource in Google Scholar. This opens a dialogue box that allows you to click on the "EndNote" button to import the citation. The second way is to install the EndNote plug-in, which shows the "Import to EndNote" option under each resource. At this time, there is no way to mass-import resources from Google Scholar into EndNote, so the second way is the fastest way. Here's how to install the EndNote plug-in for Google Scholar:
If you are publishing research, you may be interested in setting up your scholarly profile on Google Scholar to verify your articles and help keep track of your citations. When you first log in to your profile, Google will ask for your affiliation and a verification email. After this, you may begin adding your own articles and changing settings. If you have not published, you may still set up an account to begin collection citations from others' work. To set up your profile, head to Google Scholar and click on My Profile in the upper left hand corner.
Creating a profile in Google Scholar would benefit a researcher interested in seeing how their work is performing in this search engine, or to keep track of citations for their own use.
You can set up email alerts for articles as they are added to Google Scholar. In the menu on the left hand side of the screen, the Alert option is always available. You can set up an alert from that screen, but you can also create an alert for an author by going to their profile.
You can use the little quotation marks under search results to save a citation. Clicking on the quotes opens a box that has several citation styles for you to copy and paste your desired style. This is also how you can export a citation to EndNote.
You can also use the star icon to save the article to your profile. This will put it in "My Library," which can be found at the upper right hand corner of the screen.
Google Scholar has several metrics which measure the impact of authors and researchers, journal titles, and articles. To calculate author metrics, they operate off the h-index, or Hirsch index. This is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both productivity and citation impact of a scholar's publications. It's based on the set of the researcher's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. "It is defined as the highest number of publications of a scientist that received h or more citations each while the other publications have not more than h citations each" (Schreiber 2008). The h-index reflects both the number of publications and the number of citations per publication. Researchers in different fields cannot be compared with this metric; comparison only works with scientists researching in the same field.
Web of Science, Google Scholar, and Scopus use this measurement for calculating an author's impact. A researcher's h-index can vary in these different databases because databases index different journals over different amounts of time. For example, Google Scholar only considers work published after 2013 in their calculations, while Scopus goes back to 1996.
We are not sure exactly how Google Scholar indexes items, but you can read more about how Google defines its metrics.
For more information on publishing metrics, check out our guide on Scholarly Publishing.
Schreiber, M. 2018. “An Empirical Investigation of the G-Index for 26 Physicists in Comparison with the h-Index, the 4-Index, and the R-Index.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59 (9): 1513–22. Accessed October 23. doi:10.1002/asi.20856.
Have you ever found an image online and wondered where it came from? You can either drag and drop an image, browse for one on your computer, or use the URL of one already on the web in Google's Image Search. This is great for finding images similar to yours or finding citation information for one you've already found. This feature only works on the Google Images homepage. For a quick tutorial on how this works, check out the video below.
It is a violation of University of Tennessee policy to use someone else's work without attribution, but it's not always easy to attribute images you've found online. Google has options for you to filter images by Usage Rights, so you can determine whether or not an image is available for use. The different types of usage rights Google has to sort through includes
These labels roughly match up with Creative Commons licenses and the public domain. That means the images may be used without explicit permission, but they must be cited. Before reusing content, always check that its license is legitimate and check the exact terms of reuse, because Google does not always get it right.
Click through the following links for additional information about Creative Commons and the Public Domain. The Library also has a guide on Copyright and Fair Use.
Our library also has access to images in ClinicalKey and AccessMedicine. These images are available for our users for educational purposes. You can get access to these images from the Library Homepage or from ClinicalKey and AccessMedicine sites.
Google Books is an electronic index of digitized books and e-books that is separate from Google Scholar. There is not a one-size-fits-all model for what is available on Google Books. There are different levels of access and that depends upon each book in the collection. These levels are:
Preview and snippet view both are great alternatives to buying a book if you only need a particular section of the book. In addition, you can Interlibrary Loan a book and use Google Books to supplement your research needs until the book comes into the Library. If you're interested, read about Google Books on Google's official site.
When you go to Google's main page, you are directed to type your keywords into a search bar. This bar is the default "basic search" for Google. To get to the Advanced Search option, you have to first perform a basic search. From there, you can click on "Settings," then again on "Advanced Search." This will take you to a screen that will break down many search options.
Google's Advanced Search option is great if you are looking for something specific you have seen before on the web. Be aware that Advanced Search still searches the same content as Google (i.e. web sources with a few scholarly sources) but it can still be a great source of information.
A commonly overlooked feature of Google's Advanced Search option is searching by a site or domain. Whenever you type in a word or phrase, then ask it to search a site or domain, Google will only search the website or domain you are looking for. For example, if you wanted to see what UTHSC has to say about IRB, you could type "IRB" into the first search bar and "uthsc.edu" into the "site or domain" bar.
1. You must search for something in Google before you will be able to access advanced search options.
2. Click "Settings" from the menu that will appear beneath the search bar but above your search results, then Advanced Search.
3. Utilize all of Google's Advanced Search Options.
Utilize all of Google’s Advanced Search Options to refine and focus your results. The Advanced Search screen provides fields where you can enter words or phrases in very specific ways, such as:
All these words (similar to a basic keyword search).
This exact word or phrase (works like quotation marks to keep words together).
Any of these words (functions like OR searching).
None of these words (excludes terms you don’t want to see).
Numbers ranging from (lets you search within number ranges, like years or prices).
You can also narrow results by language, region, last update, site or domain, file type, and usage rights. Together, these options give you much more precision than a standard Google search box, making it easier to locate the most relevant and reliable information.
