Google Scholar provides options to associate your account with a library’s access to full text articles. After you set the option, every search result will include a proxied link to the full text when available:
Configuring this option has to be done individually, by each student using Google Scholar. In my experience, few undergraduates will jump through those hoops.
One solution is for a library to create a custom search form which proxies all access to Google Scholar. But this will periodically break, as described in another post.
A more robust option is to create a pre-scoped search form. Anybody who searches through this form will see your library’s full text links in the search results. Here’s how:
- Create a basic form to search Google Scholar, like this:
<form id="scholarbounce" action="https://scholar.google.com/scholar" method="get" name="q"> <input name="q" size="18" type="text" /> <input type="submit" value="search" /> </form> - Find your institution’s Google Scholar ID number:
- Go to Scholar’s Library Links settings
- Search for your library
- Right click and inspect your library’s entry
- Look for an input in the code with the name “inst”. Copy the long numeric value from that input. This is your ID. See screenshot. At UNC Libraries, our ID is 577910027982338313.
- Add a hidden field to your form with that ID. Here’s ours:
<input type="hidden" name="inst" value="577910027982338313" />
That’s it! Every search run through the form will have your library’s links to full text included in the results.
The final form code for UNC Libraries:
<form id="scholarbounce" action="https://scholar.google.com/scholar" method="get" name="q"> <input name="q" size="18" type="text" /> <input type="hidden" name="inst" value="577910027982338313" /> <input type="submit" value="search" /> </form>