Google Scholar is a freely available Internet search engine for academic resources in all subject fields. It searches content in peer-reviewed journal literature, books, dissertations, preprint repositories, academic society papers (if available), and technical reports. See below for answers to frequently asked questions. How do I access full-text articles cited in Google Scholar that are available to USC School of Medicine users? How do I limit my search to certain authors, publications, dates, or subjects? How comprehensive is Google Scholar? Can I use Google Scholar instead of MEDLINE (Pub Med)? Can I display search results by date? What does "Cited by" mean? What does "Web Search" mean? How do I access full-text articles cited in Google Scholar that are available to USC School of Medicine users? (back to top) On Campus: Go to the Google Scholar homepage. You can begin your search by inputting search terms in the Search box. The defaults for preferences are automatically set to University of South Carolina Columbia (USC Columbia eText) and University of South Carolina School of Medicine (Find Fulltext@ USC Med). Off Campus: To set Google Scholar preferences for off-campus School of Medicine users: Go to the Google Scholar homepage Click on “Scholar Preferences” link on the right of the search window and follow the steps shown in the screenshot below:   Google Scholar will now display Find Fulltext@ USC Med and/or USC Columbia eText with citations, related articles and web search in your search results.   How do I limit my search to certain authors, publications, dates, or subjects? (back to top) Use Advanced Scholar Search to limit your search by author, publication and date range searching. The Advanced Scholar Search also allows you to limit your search by subject, e.g., Medicine, Pharmacology, and Veterinary Science. How comprehensive is Google Scholar? (back to top) Google Scholar searches open access materials as well as items from many publishers, including some of the resources to which the University Of South Carolina School Of Medicine Library Libraries subscribe. However, Google Scholar only searches a fraction of the published scholarly literature. The University of South Carolina School of Medicine Library licenses many online databases and resources that provide more relevant, focused, up-to-date and comprehensive information. Can I use Google Scholar instead of MEDLINE (Pub Med or Ovid)? (back to top) Google Scholar includes articles from many of the same journals that can be found in MEDLINE. However, it contains only a fraction of the articles indexed by MEDLINE and there are large gaps in its coverage of important medical journals, especially for recent articles. Can I display search results by date? (back to top) No. Google Scholar search results are displayed according to relevance and not by date. Results cannot be re-sorted by date. What does "Cited by" mean? (back to top) Clicking the 'Cited by' link will display a list of articles and documents that have cited the document originally retrieved in the search. This makes it possible to uncover other documents related by topic or subject to the original document. However, Google Scholar only includes articles that are indexed within its database, and this is a much smaller subset of scholarly articles than found in some other University Of South Carolina School Of Medicine Library subscribed databases. What does "Web Search" mean? (back to top) If you have a citation, you can click "Web Search" to see if you can find the full text through a Google search. Clicking "Web Search" for a book will take you to sites to purchase the book online.