• Introduction
• What Google Scholar Does
• What Google Scholar Doesn't Do
• What to Watch Out For -- And What to Do About It
• More About Google Scholar
• Contact Us

Launched in November 2004, Google Scholar is the newest search tool from Google, separate from its main search engine, with its own URL (http://scholar.google.com).

Its purpose (says Google) is “to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.”

And (with some serious reservations) it does just that.

First and foremost, remember that this is the Beta edition of Google Scholar – which means that there will be hitches and glitches, things that it does well, things it doesn’t do very well, and things that it doesn’t do at all. Don't count on finding everything you want or need - and what you find, you may have difficulty obtaining.

That said, let’s look at what it does and doesn’t do, what to watch out for and what you can do about it.

The Search

Google has made arrangements with various academic publishers and archives to allow you to search holdings that have previously required subscriptions to look at. Unfortunately Google has not provided a complete list of which publishers or other sources are included, nor what titles and dates are available. If a publisher or archive does not have an agreement with Google to make its holdings searchable, its contents may not appear in the search results.

Searching is as simple as searching on the main Google page. It does allow the use of quotation marks to search phrases, and the ‘minus’ sign to eliminate specific terms from your results. Note that there is an Advanced Search feature (a small link to the right of the search box). This will allow you to restrict your search to a single journal, search for a particular author or title, limit the years of publication, and so forth.

Searching Google Scholar is easy. Finding good results is more difficult.

The Results

The content of your search results will vary widely. You’ll find some full-text articles but most often the links will lead only to an abstract (a brief summary of the article) or a citation (information about where and when the article was published).

One of the nice features of Google Scholar is that next to each title in the results is a "Cited By" link. Clicking on this link will lead you to other articles and papers which have included this work in their bibliographies. Warning: These are only the links found in the Google Scholar database. These are not all the places this paper has been cited. For a more comprehensive list, you should use Web of Science.

Google Scholar uses a ranking system different from that used by the main Google search engine. Just how Google ranks the results in order of relevance is unclear and probably evolving, although the number of articles cited seems to be an important factor. It also considers the authors and titles of the papers and other documents that cite the article in question.

The Google Scholar ranking method does not seem to be as effective as the main Google system in bringing the most important and most relevant results to the top. (Remember: This is a Beta version.) You’ll need to do more looking through the results.

Google Scholar is not primarily a full-text database. The links to titles and works that Google Scholar displays will very often provide only bibliographic information or abstracts.

Unless an article or book is available through an open-access publisher or archive, the full text will not be available to you for printing or downloading unless Emory has a subscription to the source for that work (or you are willing to pay for access). In many, perhaps most, cases, the Emory libraries already pay for full-text access and can provide you with the source you need.

Google Scholar is much more an alternate means of searching for scholarly works than an alternate means of actually accessing them.

Google is not a comprehensive database, even for material that is freely available through other open-access archives and databases.

The good news about Google Scholar is that you will be quickly able to locate material that will be useful to you in your scholarly research. The bad news is that you might not be able to read it – and it might not be scholarly.

What You’ll Find: Some full text is available but most citations lead only to an abstract (a brief summary) of an article at various subscriber-only services. When you click on the link, you’ll be taken to a publisher’s page, where you will find that you have to have a subscription to the journal or pay the publisher a fee to look at it.
What To Do: Look in EUCLID to see whether Emory has a subscription to the journal; if you want or need on-line full-text access, check the e-journals page.

What You’ll Find: Sometimes you won’t even have an abstract - only a citation (author, title, journal, volume, year, and page numbers).
What To Do: Look In EUCLID and/or e-journals (see above).

In some cases, the material is not actually online at all. Google Scholar may include an item only because it was found in the bibliography of another paper. These will be identified by the label ‘CITATION.’ In these cases, a Library Search and Web Search link will appear next to the paper or book's title. The Library Search link can help you find a library near you that has the journal or book, though usually WorldCat is a more accurate source of this information. The Web Search link generates a Google search of the entire web to try to find more information or perhaps the article itself.

What You’ll Find: Articles that aren’t scholarly. Several reviewers have commented on some distinctly unscholarly results or (as one reviewer gently put it) “not ‘scholarly’ using a traditional definition.”
What To Do:
(1) Be aware and be critical. Exercise some judgement about the articles you use. When in doubt, toss it out.
(2) Use scholarly databases, available through the Database Locator. (If you are trying to access these databases from off-campus, you will need your seven-digit Emory Personal ID number.)
(3) Talk to a librarian.

What You’ll Find: Google Scholar results will be a fairly random, seriously incomplete selection of materials. Key articles on your subject will not be found because those publishers are not included in the Google Scholar database. Even with open-access, full-text scholarly articles, only a fraction are found by Google Scholar.
What To Do: Broaden your search by using the main Google search engine (knowing that you will also be including huge amounts of irrelevant unscholarly material). Better still, use scholarly databases.

What You’ll Find: There is often more than one version of the paper available in the Google Scholar results, sometimes earlier (prepublication) versions, sometimes post-publication. Some will be available full-text; some will not.
What To Do: Use a scholarly database or the article as it appears in print in the journal. (Use EUCLID to find whether we own the journal, the years available, and the call number.)

You may not care too much about these problems, as long as you can find a few good results for scholarly articles from any journal of any academic publisher for the paper you’re writing. But if you’re seriously researching a topic, you should be very concerned and very careful about using Google Scholar.

For more information about Google Scholar you can look at the following on-line sites:

Google’s ‘About Google Scholar’ Page
A brief explanation and Frequently Asked Questions

Danny Sullivan, “Google Scholar Offers Access To Academic Information”

Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price, “Big News: Google Scholar Is Born”
They like it. Find out why.

Peter Jasco, “Peter’s Digital Reference Shelf,” December 2004
He hates it. Find out why.

Andrew Goodman, “Google Scholar vs. Real Scholarship”
He calls it “an interesting and noble but less-than-groundbreaking contribution to research.”

If you want to find out even more about Google Scholar, just search “Google Scholar” on Google.