Google Scholar is a search engine that allows you to broadly search for scholarly publications. The platform provides access to scholarly publications from publishers, professional societies, and repositories. You can search Google Scholar by keywords and phrases, author names, and publication titles. Because Google Scholar searches across the internet, it will return results for publications that you can not access without paying a fee.
When should you use Google Scholar?
Google Scholar is good for:
- Identifying journal titles and authors connected to your research topic.
- Finding "gray literature," things like conference posters and reports, that may not be included in academic indexing databases.
- Researching more information on partial/incomplete citations.
- Searching across multiple repositories and databases at once.
Google Scholar is another research tool to use in conjunction with books and library databases. Keep in mind that:
- Not every result in Google Scholar is a scholarly/peer-reviewed publication.
- While it gives the impression that it does a deep search, Google Scholar does not search across all journals and books so search results may miss important publications.
- You will not have free access to read the full text of every publication that appears in your search result. You will have access to publications that the Boreham Library has a subscription for in our library databases.
- Google Scholar does not include a robust search limiter system, only allowing for limiting by date/date range.
