WELCOME TO GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Google Scholar is a search engine that indexes scholarly materials that are available through the World Wide Web, as well as library holdings from WorldCat, and citations from other materials. Some of the full text items that Google Scholar points to are available free of charge; some are not. A significant portion of the journal articles Google Scholar points to are available through Drew Library e-journal subscriptions. 

In particular, many publishers who put their journal issues up on the web have submitted their sites to Google Scholar, so that pages pointing to online journal articles are retrieved, but a subscription to the electronic journal or a one time payment is necessary to access the article itself. (If Drew libraries are subscribed to the electronic journal and you are using Google Scholar from on campus, you may be able to get into the full text of the article.) Google Scholar tries to target "peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.. . . articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

For more information and tips on how to use Google Scholar, see https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/about.html

How do things get indexed in Google Scholar?

Publishers contact Google Scholar to have their material included. The references/citations of articles are also indexed, so that while a book or journal may not be available on the web, the citation will be shown if it was cited in a document Scholar indexes.

The indexing is done by Google Scholar's web-crawling software, so it may take some time for new items to be indexed.

Results are ranked by 'relevance' based on occurences of terms in the result document, as well as by Google's co-citation algorithm: "This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature".