Similar to its parent browsing platform, Google Scholar is a browser that provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature.
Advantages of Google Scholar
- Search across disciplinary literature from one place*
- Explore related works, citations, authors, and publications
- Locate the complete document through your library or on the web**
- Keep up with recent developments in any area of research
- Check who's citing your publications, create a public author profile
*Like any other browser, Google Scholar can only crawl what is indexed on the internet AND what is available before any paywalls. It is developed to search scholarly literature, but cannot realistically fulfill its claim to "search all scholarly literature from one convenient place." The platform also has much less limiters and availability of subject thesauri like a literature database available through a library or specialized institution, which creates extra hurdles in defining searches.
**As mentioned above, Google Scholar can only provide complete documents of what is available as a complete document (this does not include behind paywalls). Users must link a library where they have active membership to enable any hyperlinks to institutional access, which may still be incomplete.