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BIOL 350: MacPherson: Google Scholar Optimized

General Ecology

WIU-Optimized Link to Google Scholar

Google Scholar Date Sort

"Google Scholar is not the same thing as a "free" equivalent of a commercial scholarly database (e.g. EBSCO or ProQuest). Although it's great for finding grey literature and relatively obscure topics (not to mention tracking citation counts), it has some serious limitations for general literature reviews. In particular, it does not permit you to do many of the focused searches that commercial scholarly databases....What this means for your purposes is that, in general, you cannot do a title-abstract-keyword search on Google Scholar. The exception is that you can search for abstracts only, but only for articles added to Google Scholar in the last year. That's what you get when you click on "Sort by Date"--it's not obvious, but that means "Sort articles added in the last year by date" [emphasis added]. This is only useful to find what's new, but is useless for any general search on what exists in the literature."

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