Accessing Google Scholar

To access Google Scholar go to https://scholar.google.com. Once here, it is highly recommended that you sign in using a Gmail account. This will allow you to save articles for viewing at a later time, and access articles that are available within the UCC library databases directly from this site. To log in to a Gmail account from this screen, click the "Sign In" button, or the circular logo, in the top right corner of the page.

Once you are logged in, click the three bars in the top left corner of the screen to open a menu and select "Settings."

Next, click on "Library links." You can enter the name of any academic libraries that you are affiliated with. In our case, we simply entered "Umpqua Community College Library." Also, if the "Open WorldCat" box is selected, please unselect it. This resource is more confusing then it is helpful. Be sure to click "save" before you navigate away from this screen. Now, when performing searches in Google Scholar you can be connected with the articles as they are available in the UCC library databases.

Basic Searching

Now enter your search terms in the box and click the magnifying glass to search.

It is important to remember that you will not always be able to access the articles that these searches return. Always be sure to check out the links that show up to the right of the search result. Any items that have a link saying "Full Text @ UCC" (outlined in green in the image below) will take you to the article via the UCC Library databases. If you click on the "Full Text @ UCC" link for the article titled "Comparing scientific abstracts generated by ChatGPT to original abstracts using an artificial intelligence output detector, plagiarism detector, and blinded human reviewers" you should be directed to the article in the Gale In Context: Global Issues database.

If you are doing these searches from a computer off-campus then you may be prompted to enter your UCC username and password to access the databases. In most cases, if there is some form of a link to the right side of your search results you will be able to access those articles. You never know unless you try. If you are interested in an article that comes up but does not link to the full-text please, use the chat feature on the library website or fill out the Article/ILL Requests Form.

Looking Through Your Results

Once your results are returned you may notice the six (or more) icons/links directly underneath each article. These are useful tools that can help you to organize, cite, and locate results. For a complete explanation of these icons/links, please see the text beneath the image.

• Save: Clicking the star symbol allows for you to save materials to your library to read or access at a later point in time. Simply click the star and the resource is saved.
• Citation: Clicking this symbol (") will return you a list of citations for the article itself. As always, please check any automatically generated citations, they are often incorrect.
• Cited By: Clicking the "Cited by" link will take you to a listing of articles that have cited this specific article in their references. This is a great way to find related articles, and sometimes more current material.
• Related Articles: Clicking the "Related Articles" link will be allow you to locate more results that are similar to the currently identified article.
• All # Versions: This link will open up a listing of all locations of the article you are looking for. This is a great way to try to find a copy of the article you're wanting to access.

Limit by Date Published

The best way to find the most relevant and recent articles is to perform your search and then narrow the result down by selecting a time period. This can be done by inserting a custom date range or selecting one of the preset ranges from the list on the left-hand side of the screen.

Another way to narrow your results by date is to use the "sort by date" feature. Most searches will return a results list sorted by relevance, but sorting by date will allow you to retrieve the most recent items. Please note that sorting by date rather than by relevance does not necessarily mean that you will get the most relevant material, but that you will simply get the information that was published the most recent first.

Deeper Searching

You can do an advanced search using Google Scholar just as you can with a regular Google search. To access the advanced search menu, click the three lines in the upper left corner of the screen and select "advanced search" from the drop-down menu. A window will pop-up and allow you to fill in a variety of fields.

From here simply fill in the information that you would like to include or exclude from your search. This is a great way to search for articles from specific publications, or if you only know the author or authors.