Google Scholar provides 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 is a search engine that provides links to articles from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, and scholarly articles posted on the web. It also provides links to relevant published books that are found in the Google Books Project.
Many students feel comfortable starting their research using Google Scholar because of its similarity to Google's internet search engine. However, because it is a search engine and not a database, it is important to get to know some of the functionality and limitations of Google Scholar first.
Before you begin your search, you should set up library links. This allows Google Scholar to connect your search results to the holdings at Phillips Library, so that you can easily access the full text of articles made available by our institutional subscriptions.
1. From the Google Scholar Homepage, click on the dropdown menu symbol, the "hamburger" in the upper left. Select Settings.
2. Select Library links on the left side of the page.
3. Enter "Suffolk University".
4. Check the boxes below that mention Suffolk University and the “Open WorldCat” option and click Save.
The link to "SU Full Text" will take you from Google Scholar to the full-text options for an article in Spartan Search. The Open WorldCat link helps connect to any relevant books that Google Scholar finds.
Please note: If you are on campus using SU’s wifi network, you should automatically be linked to library holdings. However, setting up Library Links allow you to see full text links from off campus. To save your settings, you will need to create a Google account.