Google Scholar allows students and educators to search across a wide range of academic literature. It is essentially designed to help you discover scholarly sources that exist on your topic. If you discover your sources, you will want to get your hands on them. If you want to learn how to set the preferences, you need to watch the video tutorial on Google Scholar Settings.
It is a freely accessible web search engine that indicates the full text or metadata of scholarly literature. Specifically, its index included most peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, theses and dissertations, preprints, technical reports, abstracts, conference papers, and other scholarly literature subsuming court opinions and patents.
Google Scholar is similar to the functioning of freely available websites such as get cited and CiteSeerX. It also has the same characteristics as other subscription-based tools like Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivate Analytics Web Science.
Features
This tool lets to search for digital and physical copies of articles whether you’re online or in libraries. Google Scholar’s search results have links to commercial journal articles.
Most people will be able to access an abstract only, the citation details of an article, and have to pay a fee to access the entire article.
The most relevant results included for the searched keywords will be available at first based on the author’s ranking and the number of references that are linked to it, the ranking of the publication that the journal appears in, and the relevance to other scholarly literature. It has subsumed different features such as a group of, cited by, and related articles.
With the group of features, you can able to display available links to journal articles. The feature is provided with a link to both subscription-access versions of articles and to free full-text versions of articles. You can allow accessing major open access repositories by providing published links but it doesn’t provide web links individually on faculty web pages.
You can able to access the self-archived non-subscription versions which are provided by a link to Google wherein one can find open access articles. Cited by feature offers a facility to access the abstracts of articles that have been available in the article.
Formerly, it provided citation indexing which could be found in Scopus, CiteSeer, and Web Of Science. Based on the Related Articles feature, Google Scholar introduces a list of closely related articles ranked first.
Ranking System
Most academic databases and search engines let the users choose one factor whether citation counts, relevance, or publication results in order to give the rank results. It ranks results with a combined ranking algorithm in a way of researchers do, the publication in which the article appears, weighing the full text of each article, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature. Google Scholar Research puts high weight on citation counts, especially words included in a document’s title.
Search Engine Optimization for Google Scholar
For many years, Google has been popular based on Search Engine Optimization, and the same is applied to Google Scholar which is one of the academic search engine tools.
SEO for academic articles is also named as academic search engine optimization and it is defined as the publication, creation, and modification of scholarly literature. This is specifically helpful for making academic search engines crawl it and index it very easier. An SEO has been adopted by Google Scholar in order to optimize the rankings of articles.
Check Your Sources
Google Scholar uses various types of sources such as dissertations, books, articles, unpublished versions of articles, conference papers, and other sources.
Search Tips
With the help of search tips, you can easily get the most out of Google Scholar based on email alerts, citation export, and more.
Finding Recent Papers
The search results will be sorted out by relevance not by the date. In order to find newer articles, you can try out the following options such as since year to show only recently published papers which are filtered out by relevance, sort by date which shows you the new additions, and the envelope icon has the results about new updates which are periodically delivered by email.
Locating the Full Text of an Article
On Google Scholar, abstracts are freely available for any article, and reading an entire article may require a subscription. There are a few things to try out to locate the full text of an article. It included different options such as library link, all versions, a link-enabled PDF, and related articles or cited.
If you’re affiliated with the university, but don’t view the library link. In this case, you can check out your local library to get access to the best way of online subscriptions. You may need to search from a computer or library or to configure your browser in order to use a library proxy.
Getting Better Answers
- If you’re new to a specific subject and you want to know better answers, you can get help to pick up the terminology from secondary sources. For example, if you’re looking for an overweight article, Google Scholar suggests you search for a keyword like pediatric hyperalimentation.
- For suppose, if the search results are too specific for your needs, you can check out what they’re citing in the references section. References will work more often when you’re searching for general topics.
- If you think that search results are too basic for your needs, you can click on cited by to view newer papers that referenced them. Sometimes, the newer papers will often be more specific.
- Explore option is rarely a single answer to research questions. You can click related articles or cite to view closely related work. Otherwise, you can search for the author’s name if you want to know what else they have written.
Google Scholar Library
Specifically, Google Scholar Library is helpful for storing your personal collection of articles. You can easily save articles right off the search page, organize them by topic and use the search tips to quickly find the article that you want at any time and from anywhere. You can easily decide what goes into your library and keep the links up to date.
