Library Help Center

Google Scholar provides a search of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles. However, Google doesn’t work with every publisher. This is not the whole universe of scholarly materials.

You must let Google Scholar know that you have access to the full text of a lot of scholarly literature because you are part of the St. Edward’s University community and your library subscribes to a lot of scholarly content.

If you are off-campus and would like to authenticate Google Scholar on your computer so that it tells you when we have articles available through our library databases, you can follow these quick instructions:

1. Go to Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com
2. Click on the menu icon on the upper left side of the page
3. Click on the “Settings” option
4. Click on the “Library Links” option
5. In the search bar, type in the following: St. Edward’s University
6. Select the option that says “St. Edward’s University Munday Library – St. Edward’s Full Text”

(if you are on campus, you will already be connected to Google Scholar)

More information:

Results are returned in rank order. Google computes what the most relevant articles to you are and orders them from top to bottom. Relevancy is based on the frequency with which people look at articles and the connections by which these articles are connected to other articles.  It is similar to “page rank” in a regular Google search.

If you click on “cited by” you can see articles that refer to, that is cite, the article above and to locate articles that cited an article that’s helped you. Enter the article title into Scholar and look for a link to a list of articles that cited it. This is a great way to build on your research.   You will see the connection between this article and other articles throughout the scholarly universe. If you go to the far right hand side of your hits, you’ll sometimes see PDF from site.  This link actually will take you to a PDF copy of that article.  Notice that not all articles have that link.  Because of copyright restrictions, you may want to use the link in the box above  to search across Google Scholar and include the content the St. Edward’s University library pays for.  This will vastly improve your ability to obtain PDF copies of the articles you want.  (You may also use the Library Links via Settings as described above) If you click on “related articles” you will see articles that are not necessarily linked to or cited by a particular scholarly article but are topically related.  This is a way for you to expand the range of topics you might explore on a particular subject.

If you click on “More” pull down, you will see the Library Search option which is a link to the WorldCat Web site which has links to many of the world’s participating libraries. Put in your location as Austin, Texas and see where the closest copy of item is located.   You can use Interlibrary Loan to get those items. You now also have the ability to copy-and-paste formatted citations from search results.

To copy a formatted citation, click on the “Cite” link below a search result and select from the available citation styles (currently MLA, APA, or Chicago) Used the Advanced Search option located when you click on the little black arrow in the search box.   You can, for example, filter by author name.  You can also filter by time that is filter by articles that have been published in a particular date range.  You may also specify a specific title to search within, for example, the Journal of the American Medical Association. Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your queries.  An alert is a standing query.  Pretend that every day you typed in the query to look for what was new in the search results and then e-mailed it to yourself.  Create an alert if you find a search that is productive for you. Scholar will email when new search results are available.