Google Scholar provides a simple way to search scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles. However since the update of the Google homepage with its new minimalist look, it is not so high profile. It’s probably quicker just searching for Google Scholar to get to it! Once there you can search for literature and now can save useful and relevant articles to your own library.
Enter your search words as usual. You can choose to define the year of publication. Once you have clicked search you will see the option of Save under each item found. The Scholar Library allows you to save your personal collection of articles in Scholar. You can save articles right from the search page, organize them by topic, and use the power of Scholar’s full-text search & ranking to quickly find just the one you want – at any time and from anywhere.
Click “Save” below a chosen search result to save it to your library. To view your saved items simply click “My library” where you can then see all the articles in your library and search their full text. You can also use labels to organize your articles. To get you started two labels have been created: “My Citations” and “Cited by me”, based on your Scholar profile, if you have one. “My Citations” contains your profile articles and “Cited by me” contains articles you have cited.
If you click on Cite below an item, a pop up box will appear offering you formatted citations (which you will need to edit if you use Harvard). You also have the option to import a citation using one of the bibliography management tools such RefWorks.
Sue Beckingham
Social Media for Learning 