What is it?
Google Scholar is Google's search engine, which indexes data of scholarly literature online. The search results include, for example, research publications, conference papers, books, abstracts, articles published by academic publishers, universities, and other organizations. Some of the material is open access.
Strengths
- Open for everyone
- Full text access to a large extent
- Good coverage especially for conference publications, and for free and open access publications
- Searches for data in all countries and languages
- Easy to use
- Shows citation information
Limitations
- Lack of transparency: no information on which publishers and publications are included in the search, frequency of updates unknown
- Some key publishers (EBSCO and Ovid, for example) have not allowed their databases to be searched by Google. That is why articles in EBSCO, for example, cannot be found directly via Google Scholar.
- Incorrect references and citations
- All publications in Google Scholar are not necessarily scientific.
