How does the Google Scholar search work?
Frequently, researchers need to quickly lookup a paper from a citation or reference. The Google Scholar search allows a user to select all or part of a reference and run a search against Google Scholar’s database. The results are being analyzed and if a matching hit is found, the institution’s OpenURL linking server is invoked. A linking server, if properly configured, gets the user straight to an article to which they have access (as opposed to a publisher’s page where they are asked if they like to buy this article if the publisher does not recognize them as coming from their institution.) The actual Google Scholar results page is also displayed to the user. Recently, we have added an option that would completely hide from the user that Google Scholar is used. Instead, on a miss, the user would be redirected to the URL provided by the offering institution. This approach, which requires a custom OpenURL server, leaves the user’s experiences more directly under the offering library’s c
