Google Scholar

Overview

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. The Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.

History

Google Scholar was launched in November 2004 as a beta service and its inventor is Anurag Acharya. The origin and development of Google Scholar can be traced back to Acharya's work on a search engine for the scientific literature, as a way to keep track of the rapidly growing amount of scientific information.

Functionality

Google Scholar's ranking algorithm is a closely guarded secret. It is known, however, that it uses a variant of the PageRank algorithm, which was originally designed for the Google web search engine. The algorithm takes into account the full text of each document, as well as the author's profile, the source of the references, and the number of citations the work has received. This allows Google Scholar to weigh the relevance of an article in the context of the entire body of literature on that topic.

A screenshot of the Google Scholar homepage, showing the search bar and various options for refining search results.

Features

Google Scholar offers a number of features beyond simple search, including:

- Cited by: This feature allows users to see how many times a particular paper has been cited by other scholarly works. The cited by count is often used as a rough measure of the impact of a publication.

- Related articles: Google Scholar uses its ranking algorithm to identify papers that are similar to the one in question. This can be useful for finding related work that may not have been found through keyword search.

- My library: Users can save articles right from the search page, organize them by topic, and use the power of Scholar's full-text search to quickly find just the one they want - at any time and from anywhere. Users can also set up email alerts to be notified of new articles that match their search query.

- My citations: This feature allows authors to create a profile in Google Scholar, enabling them to keep track of citations to their articles.

- Metrics: Google Scholar provides several ways to measure the impact of articles, authors, and publications, including the h-index, i10-index, and five-year impact factor.

Criticisms and Limitations

Despite its advantages, Google Scholar has been criticized for not being a comprehensive or reliable source for scholarly research. Some of the criticisms include:

- Coverage and currency: Google Scholar's coverage is uneven and it does not index all scholarly articles. It also does not always include the most recent articles.

- Ranking and relevance: The ranking algorithm of Google Scholar is not transparent, which makes it difficult for users to understand why certain articles are ranked higher than others.

- Citation analysis: Google Scholar's citation analysis can be inaccurate, as it includes citations from non-scholarly sources and does not distinguish between important and trivial citations.

- Quality control: Google Scholar includes predatory journals and gray literature, which can mislead users about the quality of the content.