Email alerts now available in Google Scholar – including citation alerts

Google Scholar now supports email alerts for new results on search queries, including alerts to new citations of a given paper.  Click the envelope icon in the upper left corner of the Google Scholar page after running a search to set up an email alert on that query. To set up an alert to new citations of a work, first run a search, then click on the “Cited by X” link beneath the work you’re interested in, then on the resulting page click the envelope icon.

Google Scholar Adds US Case Law

On November 17 Google Scholar made a large collection of US Federal and State case law available online. See: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-govern-us.html

While Google has yet not provided details of the extent of the coverage, it appears as though coverage of US Supreme Court decisions begin with volume 1 of the United States Reports and other Federal and State decisions begin at 1950. (Our test of volume 10 (1810) of the United States Reports found every case we searched).

It is unclear what Google’s sources are for much of this case law (some appears to come from publicresource.org) but all cases have the same pagination as the printed reporters but do not include editorial content such as headnotes and Key Numbers.

At this stage of course the commercial sources’ (Lexis, Westlaw) added editorial content and the ability to note up make them a more complete academic research tool. Still this is an interesting development that could lead to wider access to US case law in the same way that CANLII has increased access to Canadian case law.

In addition to US case law Google Scholar also searches some major online journal collections such as Hein and JSTOR. Searching Google scholar while connected to the UofT network will link you to the full article via the Library’s licensed access to Hein or JSTOR. When not connected to the UofT network, search results are limited to only the first page of a journal article.

We will update this entry as more information comes out.