Google Scholar is a free search engine that allows users to explore a wide range of scholarly research across various disciplines. It indexes content from academic publishers, professional societies, institutional repositories, and other online archives. It also includes a scholarly selection of books available through Google Books.
Like Google, Google Scholar can only index the full text of documents that are accessible on the surface web – that is, content that is publicly available without paywalls, subscriptions, or login requirements. Full texts come from open access journals, university websites, institutional repositories, and other open archives.
Google Scholar results may often be limited to abstracts or citations, particularly for content from subscription-based journals. In such cases, accessing the full article usually requires using the university library’s databases. Nevertheless, Google Scholar is still a valuable tool for finding a wide range of academic materials, including theses, unpublished conference papers, preprints, government documents, working papers, and other types of grey literature.
Not necessarily. While Google Scholar is a powerful tool for finding academic sources, it does not exclusively index peer-reviewed or rigorously vetted sources. Instead, it uses algorithms to identify scholarly materials, such as journal articles, theses, books, conference papers, and more. But this process isn’t flawless. Google Scholar may include content that is not truly academic – such as opinion pieces or articles published in predatory journals.
These low-quality journals are called predatory because they mimic legitimate open-access publications but frequently lack proper peer review and editorial oversight. Instead, they exploit the "author-pays" model by charging researchers high fees to publish their work. Predatory journals often prey on inexperienced researchers who are eager to build their academic careers.
Google Scholar sorts search results by displaying the most relevant items first, using a method called "relevance ranking." This ranking primarily depends on the number of times a work has been cited by others. In other words, the more an item is cited by other items, the higher it ranks in the search results.
However, this ranking method has a notable limitation. Because new articles have not yet had time to be widely read and cited, they often don’t appear near the top of search results. Citation counts naturally take time to build as researchers discover, evaluate, and cite new work. Consequently, the relevance ranking system tends to favor older publications that have already accumulated a substantial number of citations. This can make it harder to find the most recent and potentially cutting-edge research, even if it is highly relevant to your topic.
The [CITATION] label before the source title in a Google Scholar result indicates that a work has been cited by another document, but Google does not have the full text or a complete record of the original source in its database. This usually means the citation was identified in a reference list, but no accessible digital version could be found. Such entries often refer to older publications or materials that haven't been digitized or are behind paywalls. While these items aren't directly accessible via Google Scholar, you may still be able to locate them through the TiU library or request them via Interlibrary Loan.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
by Tilburg University.