Some searchers found Google Scholar to be of comparable quality and utility to subscription-based databases when looking at citations of articles in some specific journals. A wide variety of sources are available via Google Scholar including journal articles, books, reports and conference papers. These sources can include journal articles, books, thesis, conference papers and reports covering a range of subjects. SEO for academic articles is also called "academic search engine optimization" (ASEO) and defined as "the creation, publication, and tenobet modification of scholarly literature in a way that makes it easier for academic search engines to both crawl it and index it". Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg demonstrated that citation counts on Google Scholar can be manipulated and complete non-sense articles created with SCIgen were indexed within Google Scholar.
Here’s a list of pro tips that will help you save time and search more effectively. Note, that it's not guaranteed that it is the version of the article that was finally published in the journal. Google does its best to find copies of restricted articles in public repositories. ➡️ Take a look at our guide on the best academic databases.
Google Scholar is a search engine designed to find academic literature from across a wide range of disciplines. For example, a library database could return podcasts, videos, articles, statistics, or special collections. Yet, Google Scholar does not return all resources that you may get in search at you local library catalog. To help you provide some structure, you can create and apply labels to the items in your library.
Features and specifications
Specialists on predatory journals say that these kinds of journals "have polluted the global scientific record with pseudo-science" and "that Google Scholar dutifully and perhaps blindly includes in its central index." Google Scholar strives to include as many journals as possible, including predatory journals, which may lack academic rigor. Google Scholar embeds clickable citation links within the case and the How Cited tab allows lawyers to research prior case law and the subsequent citations to the court decision. Through its "cited by" feature, Google Scholar provides access to abstracts of articles that have cited the article being viewed. Since December 2006, it has provided links to both published versions and major open access repositories, including all those posted on individual faculty web pages and other unstructured sources identified by similarity. Google Scholar allows users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether online or in libraries.
Can't sign in to your Google Account
A metrics feature now supports viewing the impact of whole fields of science and academic journals. Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. By default, account related notifications are sent to your new Gmail address, or to your non-Google email if you signed up with a different email address. If you can't remember that you signed in and would like to check if you have an account, enter your email address. Create or sign in to your personal Google account to enable features, such as saving results and creating alerts. Once you have found an item of interest to you in the results list, you can use functionality within Google Scholar to find similar items.
Google search tips
Use Google Scholar to find e-journal articles, material from institutional repositories and book chapters from many different sources. Google Scholar is an academic search engine, but the records found in Google Scholar are scholarly sources. A search using “self-driving cars 2015,” for example, will return articles or books published in 2015. If you are at an academic or research institution, you can also set up a library connection that allows you to see items that are available through your institution. ASEO has been criticised for allowing journals to artificially inflate their metrics and introducing spam into academic search engines.
Search engine optimization for Google Scholar
- Your search may retrieve a very large number of results, and many of them will be irrelevant.
- Unlike other indexes of academic work such as Scopus and Web of Science, Google Scholar does not maintain an Application Programming Interface that may be used to automate data retrieval.
- Use of web scrapers to obtain the contents of search results is also severely restricted by the implementation of CAPTCHAs.
- Here’s a list of pro tips that will help you save time and search more effectively.
- This feature is available by clicking on the hamburger menu in the upper left and selecting the “Advanced search” menu item.
- The full text of some sources found via Google Scholar will be freely available while others may require payment or opening an account with the source’s provider.
CredibilityIt is important to evaluate your sources from Google Scholar for credibility as not all publications will be peer-reviewed. You may need to edit these references to match your citation style accurately.Find out more with our video. How many you will look through will depend on the scale of your research, and the relevance of the results. They are organised by relevance; the more relevant results should be nearer to the top of the list.
- Google Scholar is a search engine designed to find academic literature from across a wide range of disciplines.
- Create or sign in to your personal Google account to enable features, such as saving results and creating alerts.
- Learn how to sign in on a device that’s not yours.
- Find out more about securely signing in.
- Learn how to avoid getting locked out of your account.
- Google Scholar tries to provide links to free versions, when possible.
A business account also makes it easier to set up Google Business Profile, which helps improve your business visibility and manage your online information. A Google Account gives you access to many Google products. Follow the instructions for help getting back in to your account.
You can gain even more fine-grained control over your search by using the advanced search feature. If you are looking for a particular article and know the title, it is best to put it into quotes to look for an exact match. Multiword concepts like alternative medicine are best searched as an exact phrase match. Searches are not case sensitive, however, there are a number of Boolean operators you can use to control the search and these must be capitalized. This means that if you search national parks, the words will not necessarily appear together.
This is a browser extension that allows you easily access Google Scholar from any web page. The easiest way to access Google scholar is by using The Google Scholar Button. Google Scholar tries to provide links to free versions, when possible. Google Scholar collects research papers from all over the web, including grey literature and non-peer reviewed papers and reports. Google Scholar is a bibliographic search engine rather than a bibliographic database.