Google Scholar

Google Scholar      Save to del.icio.us
Access for UMKC students, faculty and staff. All others should use the link detailed here.
Links to full text.

Google Scholar is a search engine providing results from a variety of scholarly resources, including journal articles, books, technical reports, pre-prints, and other publications.

Google Scholar provides access to a small selection of research in the form of literature, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from most subject areas; however, researchers may find the contents of Google Scholar to lean more heavily toward the sciences than the humanities. Google Scholar searches content that is not typically available on the public Web from research databases, academic publishers, professional societies, and universities. Most of the search results obtained from Google Scholar will be citations to journal articles, but book citations and cited references are also included. Google Scholar presents citations as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online, so search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications. [Source: About Google Scholar, December 2005]

Although Google Scholar does not give comprehensive results, its biggest advantage is that it is free and can find free versions of many scholarly papers. The UMKC libraries provide the underlying technology to link you directly from a Google Scholar search to an article, provided that the UMKC libraries subscribe to that journal or if the journal is freely available online. Look for the link "Full-Text @ UMKC" next to the article title. The link "Resources @ UMKC" occasionally leads to full text as well.

The University Libraries also has configured Google Scholar to link to book records through WorldCat.

For journal articles or other materials not available online, check the MERLIN Library Catalog to see if the item is available at UMKC. If not, you may request the item through the interlibrary loan service. Please note that cited references in Google Scholar have proven to be unreliable at times. We advise double-checking those in other sources for complete accuracy. For more information on interlibrary loan, or to complete a request form, see:

• Dental Library
• Health Sciences Library
• Leon E. Bloch Law Library
• Miller Nichols Library

Google Scholar is not recommended for the more in-depth or serious research endeavors. For comprehensive, efficient access to journal literature, full-text articles online, and interlibrary loan request forms, we recommend the UMKC libraries' subscription databases.

If you are not a UMKC student, faculty or staff member, you may still use Google Scholar. The search will return the same results, and links to freely available full text will still appear. Links to full text made available through UMKC subscriptions, however, will not display. Link directly to Google Scholar at http://scholar.google.com.