Google Scholar

https://scholar.google.com/scholar.google.com

Google Scholar is a free academic search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across a variety of disciplines and sources. It includes peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and articles from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, and universities.

Google Scholar can be used to:

• Find research papers: Google Scholar can be used to find research papers on a variety of topics.

• Read abstracts: Google Scholar can be used to read abstracts of research papers, without having to access the full text.

• Find full-text articles: Google Scholar can be used to find full-text articles, if they are available online.

• Track citations: Google Scholar can be used to track citations of research papers, to see who has cited them and how often.

• Create bibliographies: Google Scholar can be used to create bibliographies of research papers, for use in research papers or presentations.

Google Scholar is a powerful tool for anyone who needs to find or access scholarly literature. It is free to use and easy to navigate.

Here are some of the advantages of using Google Scholar:

• Free: Google Scholar is free to use.

• Widely used: Google Scholar is widely used by researchers and students around the world. This means that there is a lot of support and documentation available, as well as a large community of users who can provide help and advice.

• Accurate: Google Scholar is a reliable source of information, as it indexes a large number of scholarly sources.

• Up-to-date: Google Scholar is updated daily with new citations.

Why is Google Scholar better than Google for finding research papers?

One advantage of using Google Scholar is that the interface is comforting and familiar to anyone who uses Google. This lowers the learning curve of finding scholarly information.

There are a number of useful differences from a regular Google search. Google Scholar allows you to:

• copy a formatted citation in different styles including MLA and APA

• export bibliographic data (BibTeX, RIS) to use with reference management software

• explore other works have cited the listed work

• easily find full text versions of the article

Although it is free to search in Google Scholar, most of the content is not freely available. Google does its best to find copies of restricted articles in public repositories. 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.

The Google Scholar search results page

The Google Scholar results page differs from the Google results page in a few key ways. The search result page is, however, different and it is worth being familiar with the different pieces of information that are shown. Let's have a look at the results for the search term "machine learning.”

Google Scholar search results using the keywords "machine" and "learning"

The first two lines: core bibliographic information

The first two lines of a Google Scholar search results entry show the core bibliographic information: Title, authors, journal name, year of publication

1. The first line of each result provides the title of the document (e.g. of an article, book, chapter, or report).

2. The second line provides the bibliographic information about the document, in order: the author(s), the journal or book it appears in, the year of publication, and the publisher.

Clicking on the title link will bring you to the publisher’s page where you may be able to access more information about the document. This includes the abstract and options to download the PDF.

Quick full text-access options

For some entries Google Scholar provides a link to the full text (either PDF or HTML).

To the far right of the entry are more direct options for obtaining the full text of the document. In this example, Google has also located a publicly available PDF of the document hosted at umich.edu. Note, that it's not guaranteed that it is the version of the article that was finally published in the journal.

"Cited by" count and other useful links

Additional action likes to retrieve formatted citations in popular formats such as APA, MLA, and Chicago, and to assess cited by and related articles.

Below the text snippet/abstract you can find a number of useful links.

Cited by and other links

1. Cited by: the cited by link will show other articles that have cited this resource. That is a super useful feature that can help you in many ways. First, it is a good way to track the more recent research that has referenced this article, and second the fact that other researches cited this document lends greater credibility to it. But be aware that there is a lag in publication type. Therefore, an article published in 2017 will not have an extensive number of cited by results. It takes a minimum of 6 months for most articles to get published, so even if an article was using the source, the more recent article has not been published yet.

2. Versions: this link will display other versions of the article or other databases where the article may be found, some of which may offer free access to the article.

3. Quotation mark icon: this will display a popup with commonly used citation formats such as MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, and Vancouver that may be copied and pasted. Note, however, that the Google Scholar citation data is sometimes incomplete and so it is often a good idea to check this data at the source. The "cite" popup also includes links for exporting the citation data as BibTeX or RIS files that any major reference manager can import.

Google Scholar allows to retrieve formatted citations in popular formats such as APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard and Vancouver.

Tips for searching Google scholar

Although Google Scholar limits each search to a maximum of 1,000 results, it's still too much to explore, and you need an effective way of locating the relevant articles. Here’s a list of pro tips that will help you save time and search more effectively.

1. Google Scholar searches are not case sensitive

You don’t need to worry about case sensitivity when you’re using Google scholar. In other words, a search for "Machine Learning" will produce the same results as a search for "machine learning.”

2. Use keywords instead of full sentences

Let's say your research topic is about self driving cars. For a regular Google search we might enter something like "what is the current state of the technology used for self driving cars". In Google Scholar, you will see less than ideal results for this query.

The trick is to build a list of keywords and perform searches for them like self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles, or driverless cars. Google Scholar will assist you on that: if you start typing in the search field you will see related queries suggested by Scholar!

3. Use quotes to search for an exact match

If you put your search phrase into quotes you can search for exact matches of that phrase in the title and the body text of the document. Without quotes, Google Scholar will treat each word separately.

This means that if you search national parks, the words will not necessarily appear together. Grouped words and exact phrases should be enclosed in quotation marks.

3. Add the year to the search phrase to get articles published in a particular year

A search using “self-driving cars 2015,” for example, will return articles or books published in 2015.

4. Use the side bar controls to adjust your search result

Using the options in the left hand panel you can further restrict the search results by limiting the years covered by the search, the inclusion or exclude of patents, and you can sort the results by relevance or by date.

5. Use Boolean operator to better control your searches

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.

• AND requires both of the words or phrases on either side to be somewhere in the record.

• NOT can be placed in front of a word or phrases to exclude results which include them.

• OR will give equal weight to results which match just one of the words or phrases on either side.

➡️ Read more about how to efficiently search online databases for academic research.

In case you got overwhelmed by the above options, here’s some illustrative examples:

Example queries	When to use and what will it do?
alternative medicine	Multiword concepts like alternative medicine are best searched as an exact phrase match. Otherwise Google Scholar will display results that contain alternative and/or medicine.
author:"Jane Goodall"	A query for a particular author, e.g. Jane Goodall. Also "J Goodall" or "Goodall" will work, but will be less restrictive.
The wisdom of the hive: the social physiology of honey bee colonies	If you are looking for a particular article and you know the title it is best to put it into quotes to look for an exact match.
dinosaur 2014	Limits search results about dinosaurs to aticles that were publsihed in 2014
self-driving cars" AND "autonomous vehicles	Only results will be show that contain both the phrases "self-driving cars" and "autonomous vehicles"

Google scholar advanced search interface

Tip: Use the advanced search features in Google Scholar to narrow down your search results.

You can gain even more fine-grained control over your search by using the advanced search feature. This feature is available by clicking on the hamburger menu in the upper left and selecting the "Advanced search" menu item.

Google Scholar advanced search interface.

Customizing search preferences and options

Adjusting the Google Scholar settings is not necessary for getting good results, but offers some additional customization, including the ability to enable the above-mentioned library integrations.

The settings menu is found in the hamburger menu located in the top left of the Google Scholar page. The settings are divided into five sections:

• Search Results: this section has the most common controls, including:

  • Collections to search: by default Google scholar searches articles and includes patents, but this default can be changed if you are not interested in patents or if you wish to search case law instead.

  • Bibliographic manager: you can export relevant citation data via the “Bibliography manager” subsection.

• Languages: if you wish for results to return only articles written in a specific subset of languages, you can define that here.

• Library links: as noted, Google Scholar allows you to get the Full Text of articles through your institution’s subscriptions, where available. Search for, and add, your institution here to have the relevant link included in your search results.

• Button: the Scholar Button is a Chrome extension which adds a dropdown search box to your toolbar. This allows you to search Google Scholar from any website. Moreover, if you have any text selected on the page and then click the button it will display results from a search on those words when clicked.

Using the "my library" feature in Google scholar

When signed in, Google Scholar adds some simple tools for keeping track of and organizing the articles you find. These can be useful if you are not using a full academic reference manager.

All the search results include a “save” button at the end of the bottom row of links, clicking this will add it to your "My Library".

To help you provide some structure, you can create and apply labels to the items in your library. Appended labels will appear at the end of the article titles. For example, the following article has been assigned a “RNA” label:

A Google Scholar My Library entry with a label termed RNA.

Within your Google Scholar library, you can also edit the metadata associated with titles. This will often be necessary as Google Scholar citation data is often faulty.