About ITC
Newsletter: Fall 2007
Google Scholar Comes to Online@UT
Google Scholar is now an integrated component of Online@UT. Using this new functionality in Blackboard, you can easily incorporate Google Scholar (content and search) into your Online@UT course site(s).
Google Scholar Content allows you to browse Google Scholar from within a course site and to contextually add both search results and the queries themselves directly from Google Scholar into that site with just a few clicks. For example, you might create a “Google Scholar Content” item, search for “Iraq,” and find The United States and State Building, by Rand. Clicking on the link “import into Blackboard” would then create an item in your course site that references that particular article in Google Scholar.
Google Scholar Search allows you to create a stored query that makes it easy for students to perform a real-time search of Google Scholar. For example, you could create a search specifying the keyword “Iraq.” Your students would click on the resulting link to find all entries in Google Scholar that include that keyword (nearly 400,000 entries). Providing students with well structured Google Scholar searches is a great way to teach students how to create effective search strings.
Google Scholar is widely used by faculty across the country to search scholarly literature. From a single location, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities, and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature. The most relevant results will always appear on the first page. When used from within Blackboard, Google Scholar provides simple links to the University Libraries for document retrieval.
Suppose you want your students to review a selection of scholarly papers written by a specific author on a specific topic. Google Scholar will help you locate related papers. The Blackboard integration will allow you import the content directly into you Online@UT course site.
Google Scholar should not be viewed as a substitute for University Library holdings. While it can provide timely access to a wide range of scholarly articles and sources of information, it is not comprehensive and is not a substitute for the services and expertise available via the library.
Google Scholar is free and available within the Online@UT course control panel. If you’d like to learn more, keep an eye out for special topic workshops and special user support documentation provided by the ITC.