Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature and therefore can be considered a Discovery Service. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
Search Results from Google Scholar may have links to access the document directly from various resources and content is exposed to users in four different ways: Feature Links, Version Links, Access Links and Library Links. Please note that results can have just one link, all links or any combination of links available through Google Scholar.
Feature Links
While Google Scholar indexes content, it determines if the article is unique (meaning the article is not indexed by another source in their knowledge base). If the article is unique then the feature link will go directly to the original source. The Feature Link is the article title of the citation.
Version Links
If the document is indexed more than once in Google Scholar, then the link becomes available as a Version Link. Version Links are links to all other sources that contain the full text of the article. The Version links are located below the citation with the link label as “All X versions” (where X is the number of version links).
Access Links / Library Links
For each Google Scholar search result, they try to find a version of the article that can be read. These access links are labelled [PDF] or [HTML] and appear to the right of the search result. Access Links cover a wide variety of ways in which articles may be available to users and can include articles that our library subscribes to, open access articles, free-to-read articles from publishers, preprints, articles in repositories, etc.
Libraries may opt to set up Library links, which are article-level links to subscription full text for patrons affiliated with a library. When a user searches Google Scholar and a result is found that is part of the institutional subscription, then a link will appear to the full text. Library Links to the Department of Library Services subscribed content will display as “FullText@UP”. Library links are especially useful for remote users who are not accessing resources from within the UP Libraries.
