Making Sense of Library Research

Before using Google Scholar, you will need to set a few things up first:

1. Click the down arrow button in the top right of Google Scholar.
2. Click Settings.
3. Click Library Links and search for Houston Christian University. 
4. Click all the check boxes for HCU and click the Save button. NOTE: This saves the settings on that computer only. You will need to this on ANY other computer you use. This is true even on the computers on the HCU Campus.

Now, you are ready to search. 

1. Search your terms. This will be a general keyword search. Remember, just because your words appear does not mean that the article is actually about topic.
    
2. Advanced Search. This is also available under Settings.
   
   
   This is what you will see. The available options can be most useful.
    
3. The results are ranked by relevance. Matching or near matching will be listed first.  Beneath each entry, you will see a link that says 'Cited by ...' and a number. That is one indicator of an articles acceptance in academia, however, it is not perfect or based on Citation Index. If you click "Cited by ...," then you will bring up a list of documents citing that particular article within Google Scholar.
   
    
4. You will see FullTextFinder@HCU on the right side of results. This will easily take you articles in journals that HCU Moody Library can access. Although it is helpful, it has some issues to be aware of. Let's start with this citation. From all indications, HCU does not have access to this since you don't see the FullTextFinder@HCU notice.
   
   
   But -- notice the double blue arrows on the bottom line. When you click it, you will see:
   
   
   Full Text Finder suddenly appears; however, clicking the link reveals that HCU does not actually carry this after all. EBSCO is looking into this problem with Google Scholar. It is too difficult to test but we believe that most citations such as this will likely not work.
   
   
5. Results with [Citation] at the beginning of the title are listed in Google Scholar as a citation. Both types of entries are useful for tracing citations forward. As far as it is known, one forum states, "[Citation] means that Google Scholar has not been able to find a source for the publication, but that it has inferred that it exists because other publications cite it."
   
   
    
6. Look to the right of your searches in the screenshot above and you will see different terms and phrases including: FullTextFinder@HCU, PDF, HTML (see the screenshot above in #3). These are different access points to the article. Anything with HCU in takes you back to our databases and why you used the Settings options first mentioned above. This will help your research. Otherwise, PDF and HTML articles take you to another source.
   
   a. Be aware that clicking on these instead of using FullTEXTFINDER@HCU will take you to a publisher database.
   
   b. For JSTOR articles without an HCU identifier, you can login to JSTOR  from our database page and search for the article manually. 
   
   c. Many PDF or HTML articles are becoming more free but you will occasionally run into a pay wall, especially if the link takes you to a regular publisher.