CCC LibAnswers: Los Angeles City College Public FAQs

You can find scholarly content on the web with Google Scholar. It's useful for conducting comprehensive literature reviews beyond the library's collection. If the Library doesn't have an article you want, check Google Scholar. You may find a free copy online. We recommend using Google Scholar to supplement your LACC Library database searches, not replace them.

If you click an article's title, you may be taken to a publisher's site that will ask you to pay for full text. Instead, look for a PDF or HTML link to the right of the article. This is a free, full-text copy.

Setting up Google Scholar LACC Library LInks

You can customize Google Scholar to provide full-text links to journal articles available through the LACC Library’s subscriptions. If you are on campus Google Scholar should recognize you as an LACC user and link you to the full text.

If you are researching from OFF-CAMPUS, try one of these options:

1. Use this Google Scholar link, which will authenticate you as being affiliated with LACC

OR

2. Configure your Google Scholar account

You will need to manually activate Google Scholar Library Links:

1. Go to Google Scholar search page.
2. Click on the  Menu button and then click  Settings.
3. Select Library links and search for Los Angeles City College.
4. Check Los Angeles City College – View it @ LACC in the search results, then click Save.

When full text is available through a LACC Library subscription, you will see the View it @ LACC link to the right of the citation:

Pros:

• Only scholarly material is included in Google Scholar, according to the inclusion criteria: “content such as news or magazine articles, book reviews, and editorials is not appropriate for Google Scholar.”  Technical reports, conference presentations, and journal articles are included, as are links to Google Books.
• This database is a citation index, meaning you can search the number of times an article has been cited by other people.  This is a function of many credible databases.
• Google Scholar is interdisciplinary, meaning you are searching a huge range of topics all at once.  You get different search results this way than you’d find in traditional databases, as a result.
• It’s easy to use because it’s familiar.

Cons:

• You will likely hit a paywall when trying to access certain articles, asking for payment to access the full-text of the article, which won't happen when you are searching through your library's databases. 
• It rarely finds all of the reliable material that “scholarly” databases do, and it sometimes misses really important articles: studies comparing Google Scholar with PsycINFO, PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and more found that Google Scholar was unable to produce all of the articles listed in the scholarly databases.  This means you can’t rely on Google Scholar alone.
• Computer errors are more common with Google Scholar because it isn’t maintained by people: broken links, repetitive results, and other issues are more likely with this database than others.

(Adapted from Beryl Ivey Library Blog and Stanford Libraries)