Why use Google instead of Google Scholar?

Use Google to find websites on a specific topic eg, palliative care and to find reports and clinical guidelines in the websites of government health departments, medical and health research centres, professional colleges, hospitals, DHBs and NGOS and other "Grey literature" resources.

There are useful free resources such as:

• the NCBI databases eg, OMIM, BLAST, PubChem
• DisasterLit - Free disaster medicine and public health documents including expert guidelines, research reports.
• molecular databases hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute
• preprint databases eg medRXiv - tip: use google and create a search eg site:www.medrxiv.org/ (Covid OR nCov OR coronavirus OR SARS-CoV-2) "quit smoking". There is also an alternate search interface https://mcguinlu.shinyapps.io/medrxivr/
• and clinical guideline sites eg Evidence Search

A lot of New Zealand information is produced as reports. Use Google to search for them.

Think about which organisations may produce relevant material in your specific subject area and explore their websites eg

• Ministry of Health, 
• Te Arai Research Group on palliative care and end-of-life research in New Zealand
• Pacific Health Research Centre
• Health and Disability System Review

Google Scholar, a subset of Google, includes mostly articles from academic journals. Access Google Scholar via its Library database Connect page to obtain full text articles paid for by the Library.

There are limitations to web searching. The table gives a summary of the differences between sources found freely on the internet and those only accessible through library subscribed databases.