Google Scholar (GS) provides an easy way to search for scholarly literature. The content covered in GS includes articles, books, theses, technical reports, conference papers, and court opinions. GS ranks documents by weighing the frequency of keywords, where the document was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in others.
Searching in Google Scholar is fast and easy, but there are some important issues to keep in mind when searching GS including that it doesn't have great advanced search features compared to many other databases. Check out these Google Advanced Search Operators for more advanced searching options.
Check out other relevant subject guides for more information on subject specific databases.
You can configure Google Scholar to use the McGill Library Link Resolver to access articles that are available through our subscriptions.
To configure Google Scholar to show McGill Library links:
Now when you search in Google Scholar, you’ll see a link for “McGill Library Full Text” next to items in your search results.
Click on this link and the WorldCat Link Resolver will show you how you can access the full text of the article through McGill Library's subscriptions.
Note for off-campus use: If you are off-campus, using the "McGill Library Full Text" link will automatically activate the EZproxy login when you try to access the article. You'll be able to login using your McGill username and password to access the full-text article.
Clicking on the article title will also take you directly to the article, but you won't be able to access it because you haven't logged in.
Litmaps is a tool that allows you to see where a single paper sits within the literature landscape. It is a great discovery tool for finding related articles.
From a single paper, Litmaps generates a map of the most relevant articles that relate to your seed paper. The most recent articles appear on the right, the most cited articles appear at the top and the lines show the citations in-between.
Litmaps Features: To get started with Litmaps, simply enter a DOI, Pubmed ID or arXiv ID, a keyword or an author’s name into the search box and Litmaps will generate a set of recommended articles for you. Once you’ve got a basic Litmaps you’re going to want to explore the space around it to find related articles. To do this simply add more articles to your search, which will refine the recommendations Litmaps gives you.
A Litmaps shows the relationships between the articles in your collection in the form of connecting lines which trace the citations for you. By default, the most recent articles appear on the right hand side of the graph and the most cited articles appear at the top, so recent popular articles appear in top right hand corner.
Please note that you have to create an account to use the free version of Litmaps.
Here's a quick ~4min video introducing Litmaps.
McGill Libraries • Questions? Ask us!
Privacy notice