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Business Research

Introduction to Business Resources at Buley Library and Beyond

Using Google Scholar with your SCSU Login

Google Scholar is a search engine that provides links to full-text articles from publications to which SCSU subscribes or to articles made freely available by the publisher. Scholar also provides articles from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and scholarly articles posted on the web. Finally, Scholar provides citations along with abstracts of the article if it is protected by copyright.

Like regular Google, Google Scholar uses a "relevance" algorithm to determine the ranking of the results. This takes into account the position of your search words in the titles, abstracts, and other descriptive material about the document.

The "Scholar" in Google Scholar is not the equivalent of the "Scholarly Journals" or "Peer-Reviewed Journals" check boxes in the databases. Scholarly in this case refers to non-commercial sites, like universities, and to publisher websites. Google Scholar does have scholarly and peer-reviewed articles, but also has non-reviewed articles and presentations, pre-prints (pre-publication versions of articles), reports, and a wide variety of other materials that exist on scholarly websites or have been cited in other scholarly works.

Not all materials listed in Google Scholar are freely available. Few books will be entirely online, for instance. In many cases, especially with journal articles, when you click on a title in your search results, you will only see an abstract of the article, and be asked to pay to see the entire article. However, Google Scholar also allows you to hook into our library subscriptions.

If you are on campus, Google Scholar recognizes your location and automatically shows you the link to the library materials.

If you are off campus, there are two ways of seeing links to library subscriptions:

  1. Use a link that goes through our database login: the Google Scholar search box on the Library Home page or find it on our A-Z Database List
  2. Setting Scholar Preferences for Library Links (see instructions below)

Setting Google Scholar Preferences for Library Links

Setting Scholar Preferences for Library Links

You can set Google Scholar to recognize which school you are affiliated with:

  1. Click on the menu option (3 bar icon) in the upper left to access Settings. You can also access this on any results page. (A side note: under the Search results page, you can select to import to a citation manager, like BibTeX or Endnote.)
  2. To set library access, choose Library Links. 
  3. Search for Southern Connecticut. The most important ones to add are 'Southern Connecticut State University--SCSU Journal Finder' and 'Southern Connecticut State University -- ViewIt@Southern'. Use both if they both show up, but either one will work alone. You can search for and add other libraries if you have access elsewhere as well.
  4. Click Save. Once you have the library links set and you do a search, you will see links to SCSU Journal Finder/ViewIt@Southern, which work like the Find Article @ SCSU links in our databases.

Also check the main title link, which leads to the "official version," any other links, which often lead to freely accessible versions of the articles, AND the SCSU Journal Finder/ViewIt link, which will check if the article is accessible in our databases.