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ISF 189 & 190: Thesis: Google Scholar & BASE

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is an easy way to do interdisciplinary research, and with some settings changes can become even more useful.  You need a Google account to use these features.

  • Set up a Google Scholar Alert to be automatically notified when new articles are added to Google on topics of interest: 

Do your search in Google Scholar. Look in the left sidebar for the Create Alert link next to the envelope icon, and click it.  New items will be sent to your email account as they are found by Google.

  • Make Google display links to full text of articles that Berkeley subscribes to:

Open Scholar. Click on the menu icon three linesin the upper left corner and then the gear icongear, settingsto reach the settings page. On the next screen, choose Library Links from the left-hand menu. In the search box, type the word Berkeley.  Choose University of California, Berkeley - Get it at UC, and Open Worldcat Search.

Do a Google Scholar search. Click on the "Cited by" link under a citation and select the "Search within articles citing..." checkbox.

BASE

BASE logoCreated by Bielefeld University Library, BASE is an excellent resource for finding academic web resources. The search tool provides more than 300 million documents from more than 11,000 content providers. About 60% of the content is freely available (Open Access). 

 

Unlike Google Scholar, BASE allows you to search just the metadata of documents, not the full text of the resources indexed. 

The Basic search provides a single search field and will search all of metadata by default. On the search results page, there are facets that allow you to limit your search results (for example, subject, language, year of publication). 

The Advance search allows you to specify which metadata fields you want to search (for example, author, title, doi) and to limit your search to different types of documents, publication year, and other facets.

Search Help provides guidance on how to construct a search. Like many of other search engines, a search for more than one term automatically retreieves results containting all the terms. Quotation marks can be used for phrase searching. But other search syntax is availalble to help you construct more sophisticated searches.

Plural, genitive and other word forms will be searched automatically. To disable this feature, choose "Verbatim search" in the advanced search or in the search field on the results page.

If you choose the option "Multi-lingual search" in the advanced search or in the search field on the results page you can also search for synonyms and translations, provided that the search term is included in Eurovoc Thesaurus or Agrovoc Thesaurus.

 

Off-campus Access to Library Resources

There are two ways to connect to library resources from off-campus using the new library proxy:

  1. Links to online resources on library websites, such as UC Library Search, will allow you to login with CalNet directly.
  2. To access library resources found via non-UCB sites, such as Google or Google Scholar, you can add the EZproxy bookmarklet to your browser. Then, whenever you land on a licensed library resource, select your EZproxy bookmarklet to enable CalNet login.

More information is on the EZproxy guide.

The campus VPN provides an alternate method for off-campus access.