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BIOL 4232 / 5232: Herpetology

This guide accompanies the course offered in the Biology Department at the University of Central Missouri.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature. Google Scholar is a good resource for finding scholarly sources online but if it doesn't know that you have rights to access online articles and other sources from a library, it might send you to a page which asks you to pay for the article you want.

With a few adjustments to your preferences, you can tell Google Scholar to point you to the resources that the library provides for the UCM community.

Before you get started, change your "Settings" so that Google Scholar knows you are affiliated with University of Central Missouri (UCM) when working off-campus.

Follow these steps to add UCM to your Google Scholar preferences:

1. Go to https://scholar.google.com/

2. Click "Settings" in the left menu bar

Screenshot of Google Scholar settings for setting up library links.

3. Click "Library links" on the left side of the screen:

4. In the search box, type University of Central Missouri 

5. Check the boxes that appear

6. Click "Save" 

 

Screenshot of Google Scholar settings for setting up library links.

Google Scholar GIF showing how to add UCM Library Links to Google Scholar search results.

Understanding Google Scholar Entries

Google Scholar results will typically show the title of an article or book as a hyperlink with author and publisher information below. Each entry will also show Google's links for the result.

By clicking the "Cited by" link on an entry, you can see which other scholars have subsequently cited that article or book. This is known as forward chaining. The link for "Related Articles" will show similar results to the title using Google's algorithm. These could include articles with similar keywords, authors, subjects, or abstracts.

An image of an article result in Google Scholar for an exploration of school counselor small group work experience

If you are signed in with your UCM email address, you will also be able to click the double arrow icon under the result to see Resources @ My Library or Request through UCM. These links will take you back to the UCM Interlibrary Loan request or the UCM library catalog, respectively.

image of resources at my library link on a google scholar result