science

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Google Scholar rather than just read about it. In short: 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. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, includin…

Key takeaways

Google Scholar belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Google Scholar to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Google Scholar from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

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. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes 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. Google Scholar uses a web crawler, or web robot, to identify files for inclusion in the search results. For content to be indexed in Google Scholar, it must meet certain specified criteria. An earlier statistical estimate published in PLOS One using a mark and recapture method estimated approximately 79–90% coverage of all articles published in English with an estimate of 100 million. This estimate also determined how many online documents were available. Google Scholar has been criticized for not vetting journals and for including predatory journals in its index. The University of Michigan Library and other libraries whose collections Google scanned for Google Books and Google Scholar retained copies of the scans and have used them to create the HathiTrust Digital Library.

History Google Scholar arose out of a discussion between Alex Verstak and Anurag Acharya, both of whom were then working on building Google's main web index. Their goal was to "make the world's problem solvers 10% more efficient" by allowing easier and more accurate access to scientific knowledge. This goal is reflected in the Google Scholar's advertising slogan "Stand on the shoulders of giants", which was taken from an idea attributed to Bernard of Chartres, quoted by Isaac Newton, and is a nod to the scholars who have contributed to their fields over the centuries, providing the foundation for new intellectual achievements. One of the sources for the texts in Google Scholar is the University of Michigan's print collection. Scholars have gained a range of features over time. In 2006, a citation importing feature was implemented supporting bibliography managers, such as RefWorks, RefMan, EndNote, and BibTeX. In 2007, Acharya announced that Google Scholar had started a program to digitize and host journal articles in agreement with their publishers, an effort separate from Google Books, whose scans of older journals do not include the metadata required for identifying specific articles in specific issues. In 2011, Google removed Scholar from the toolbars on its search pages, making it both less easily accessible and less discoverable for users not already aware of its existence. Around this period, sites with similar features such as CiteSeer, Scirus, and Microsoft Windows Live Academic search were developed. Some of these are now defunct; in 2016, Microsoft launched a new competitor, Microsoft Academic. A major enhancement was rolled out in 2012, with the possibility for individual scholars to create personal "Scholar Citations profiles". A feature introduced in November 2013 allows logged-in users to save search results into the "Google Scholar library", a personal collection which the user can search separately and organize by tags. Via the "metrics" button, it reveals the top journals in a field of interest, and the articles generating these journal's impact can also be accessed. A metrics feature now supports viewing the impact of whole fields of science and academic journals. Google also included profiles for some posthumous academics, including Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman. For several years, the profile for Isaac Newton indicated he was as a "professor at MIT", with a "verified email at mit.edu".

Features and specifications Google Scholar allows users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether online or in libraries. It indexes "full-text journal articles, technical reports, preprints, theses, books, and other documents, including selected Web pages that are deemed to be 'scholarly.'" Because many of Google Scholar's search results link to commercial journal articles, most people will be able to access only an abstract and the citation details of an article, and have to pay a fee to access the entire article. The most relevant results for the searched keywords will be listed first, in order of the author's ranking, the number of references that are linked to it and their relevance to other scholarly literature, and the ranking of the publication that the article appears in.

Groups and access to literature Using its "group of" feature, it shows the available links to journal articles. In the 2005 version, this feature provided a link to both subscription-access versions of an article and to free full-text versions of articles; for most of 2006, it provided links to only the publishers' versions. Since December 2006, it has provided links to both published versions and major open access repositories, including all those posted on individual faculty web pages and other unstructured sources identified by similarity. On the other hand, Google Scholar does not allow to filter explicitly between toll access and open access resources, a feature offered Unpaywall and the tools which embed its data, such as Web of Science, Scopus and Unpaywall Journals, used by libraries to calculate the real costs and value of their collections.

Citation analysis and tools Through its "cited by" feature, Google Scholar provides access to abstracts of articles that have cited the article being viewed. It is this feature in particular that provides the citation indexing previously only found in CiteSeer, Scopus, and Web of Science. Google Scholar also provides links so that citations can be either copied in various formats or imported into user-chosen reference managers such as Zotero. "Scholar Citations profiles" are public author profiles that are editable by authors themselves. Individuals, logging on through a Google account with a bona fide address usually linked to an academic institution, can now create their own page giving their fields of interest and citations. Google Scholar automatically calculates and displays the individual's total citation count, h-index, and i10-index. According to Google, "three-quarters of Scholar search results pages ... show links to the authors' public profiles" as of August 2014.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Google Scholar

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Google Scholar claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Google Scholar before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Google Scholar ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Google Scholar

In research: Google Scholar appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Google Scholar in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Google Scholar is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Bibliographic databases and indexes, Citation indices, Google services, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Google Scholar outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Google Scholar in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Google Scholar means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Google Scholar out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Google Scholar in simple terms?

Why does Google Scholar matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Google Scholar?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Google Scholar.