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Google Scholar: Researching with Google Scholar

Make Google Scholar work for you

Am I really allowed to use Google Scholar?

Google Scholar is different from Google. Google searches public web content. If your lecturer said not to use Google, they probably meant that they want you to use scholarly resources, not content from the public web.

When using Google Scholar, consider the following:

  • What feature does it have to help me get relevant results?
  • What does this tool do well?
  • What does it do poorly?

As a research tool, Google Scholar is good for many tasks, and not as good for others.


Google Scholar is useful for:
  • Locating more information on partial citations.
  • Locating obscure references that are proving difficult to find in other conventional databasees.
  • Discovering keywords that define your topic.
  • Helping a beginning researcher identify journal titles and authors connected with subjects of interest.
  • Finding "grey literature" like conference proceedings. It includes many articles that wouldn't get included in other indexing services, such as Scopus.
  • Highlighting highly cited works on the topic.

 

Google Scholar cannot:
  • Search with the accuracy of Library Search or library databases.
  • Sort/search by disciplinary field.
  • Browse by title.
  • Limit search results.
  • Search the deep web.

 

Important!

Not everything in Google Scholar is scholarly. Google Scholar searches academic websites (.edu) as well as journals and publisher websites. Search results can include powerpoints, news announcements or unpublished materials as well as articles and books. 

It is difficult to determine with 100% accuracy all that Google Scholar searches. Therefore, we do not know the breadth of what Google Scholar is indexing and consequently cannot judge the comprehensiveness or completeness of the results of a literature search. Click here for more guidance on how to choose the right sources for your studies. 

We cannot tell how frequently items in Google Scholar are updated.

Searching in Google Scholar is imprecise when compared with discipline-specific databases. If your research is needing more comprehensive searching, use individual library databases, such as the ones listed in Database A-Z