Established in 2004, Google Scholar is a massive database of scholarly literature that allows users to access information, cross reference it with other sources, and keep up with new research as it comes out. Using Google Scholar, you can access these kinds of sources:.
Well, the academic community is not decided on this topic, calling Google Scholar sometimes a database and sometimes a search engine. There is no general definition of criteria that have to be met by a service to qualify as an academic, bibliographic or citation database. While related services such as Web of Science, Scopus, or Medline all declare on their websites that their offered services are databases, Google Scholar does not do so, and that’s the root of this dilemma.
The Google Scholar platform is interdisciplinary, meaning you can search for a wide range of topics at once. The result is that you get different search results this way than you would in a subject-specific database. You can find A LOT more material in Google Scholar than in some other databases ( not all ).
Should Google Scholar be referred to as an academic database?
Google Scholar is an academic search engine Our conclusion is that Google Scholar should be referred to as an academic search engine an not an academic database. The main reason for this decision is that it lacks a stable document identifier and that it is not guaranteed that a once added document will also be shown in future search results.
What are the features of Google Scholar?
Search all scholarly literature from one convenient 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.
Google Scholar searches across many scholarly disciplines and sources : articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, and universities with non scholarly results filtered out.
A common query we ran across in our research was “What are some criticisms of Google Scholar?”.
An early criticism was that Google Scholar did not have the same coverage as other databases, but a 2017 study showed that this was no longer as much of an issue (Halevi, Moed, & Bar-Ilan, 2017). This database is a citation index, meaning you can search the number of times an article has been cited by other people.
Does Google Scholar search the entire public web?
Google Scholar does not search the entire public web, but limits it’s scope to resources from academic publishers, universities, and academic repositories.
For several years, SEO has also been applied to academic search engines such as Google Scholar.
Why does Google Scholar delete works from its own search index?
If Google Scholar finds that e., and g. A working paper that is already indexed was removed from the university repository and there is no other copy available on the web, it will also delete it from its own search index.