Using Google Scholar to Search for Online Availability of a Cited Article in Engineering Disciplines

Many published studies examine the effectiveness of Google Scholar (Scholar) as an index for scholarly articles. This paper analyzes the value of Scholar in finding and labeling online full text of articles using titles from the citations of engineering faculty publications. For the fields of engineering and the engineering colleges in the study, Scholar identified online access for 25% of the chemical engineering and 13% of the mechanical engineering citations. During the study the format that Scholar (which is in beta version) used to present the result set changed. This change now makes discovery of online access to full text of an article readily apparent when it occurs.