Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes and provides access to scholarly literature across many disciplines.
Google Scholar describes itself as providing "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."
In order to be recognised by Google Scholar as being affiliated to the University of Limpopo, and UL Library subscription resources, you need to change your Google Scholar settings by doing the following:
3. On the left side select 'Library links'
4. In the 'Library links' search box, search for 'University of Limpopo'
5. Select the checkbox for University of Limpopo - Turfloop Campus
6. Click on the 'Save' button
7. Close and re-open your browser
After this setup you will then be able to connect to electronic resources which the University of Limpopo subscribes, given that those resources are part of your search results.
Major difference between Google Scholar and library databases:
Google Scholar | Library Databases | |
---|---|---|
Access | Most full text articles are not free | Most full text articles are accessible freely because libraries has subscriptions to them |
Content | You conduct a broad academic resources search without limiting to any resource | You can limit search to specific databases or journals |
Content Indexing | Does not use publishers or library data | You can limit and filter searches by different options provided by publishers |
Reliability/Validity |
Some resources might not be academic. You must verify the trustworthiness of where the resource comes from |
Sources are reviewed by editors, scholars, or other professionals |
(Yale Library, 2020)