Researchers Guide: Google Scholar

Researchers Guide: Google Scholar


Free access databases and search engines like Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science allow students, researchers, and professionals to access literary data easily and stay updated about new research trends or find relevant sources for their research projects.
Google Scholar has a large amount of scholarly data, such as research articles, review articles, books, etc., covering the vast majority of disciplines and fields; it is equipped with many features and filters to allow users to find resources relevant to their field.
There are many standout features of Google Scholar, such as an author profile that provides valuable information about the research input of a scholar in a relevant field. Additionally, Google Scholar allows the integration of additional software and tools, such as reference managers, to help researchers organize their Bibliological data.
This article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of what Google Scholar is, its utility for researchers and professionals, and its different valuable features. It explores its role in finding research topics and the tools that can be integrated with Google Scholar and sheds light on its limitations.


What is Google Scholar?


Google Scholar is an academic version of Google. It is a free search engine that indexes scholarly resources such as research articles, books, and journals across various fields and disciplines.
It is a free-access research tool that scholars, researchers, and professionals can use to find relevant literature, access articles, citations, and abstracts, and stay up to date about new research trends and topics.
Google Scholar searches the repositories of publishers, universities, and scholarly websites to provide relevant results according to scholarly literature.


Google vs. Google Scholar

Google Scholar has many advantages, especially when doing research and scholarly work.

  • It has a straightforward interface that is easy to navigate and allows you to find relevant information.
  • It provides access to many free-to-access articles and shows related articles or articles cited by your article of interest.
  •  It also provides an option of copying formatted citations and references in styles such as MLA or APA. Moreover, it also allows the user to export the bibliographic data to use with referencing software such as EndNote.

Key features and functionalities of Google Scholar


The home page of Google Scholar allows the user to search for articles, books, and other related articles in any discipline. They can search by using words related to their topic. The search result page has some elements like the title of the document (article, book, chapter, etc.), then under the name of the document, the bibliographic information is given in the following order: author, journal, or book it appears in, the volume and issue in case of journal, the year of publication and publisher.

  •  By clicking on the title, the user can get more information about the document, such as abstracts or the option to download the full-text article.

There are some more options with the title of each document, such as:

Cited by:


This link shows all the articles that have cited the article the user is looking at. It is a valuable feature in the sense that it allows the user to assess the credibility of the article. Secondly, it allows the user to explore more recent research papers that have cited the source.


Versions:

Sometimes, free access to articles is not available; this feature allows one to explore other versions and databases of the article, which may offer free access.


Quotation mark icon:`


Clicking this icon shows the user standard citation formats such as MLA, APA, Chicago, and Harvard, which may be copied, pasted, or exported to referencing software.


Advanced search techniques


To search effectively try to search your topic field and specific topic-related keywords, Use keywords instead of long sentences or phrases, this way Google Scholar will you relevant results much faster.

  • Enclose the search phrase and words in quotation marks, and Google Scholar will give you results that match the exact same matches of your word or phrase in the text body of the article.
  • Moreover, the searches are not case-sensitive. For example, it will give the same result for "Artificial Intelligence" and "artificial intelligence".
  • There are also some options to filter search results in the left-hand panel. It allows the user to narrow down the result by criteria such as publication year, inclusion or exclusion of patent and citation, and adjust to view review articles specifically.


Boolean operators such as AND, OR, and NOT can also be used to refine searches.

  • AND; place it between two phrases or words to ensure both the word/phrase are present somewhere in the record.
  • OR: placing it between two phrases or words in a search query ensures equal importance to the results matching any of the words or phrases on either side of the operator.

 NOT; placing it before a word or phrase ensures that it is not included in search results.


Staying Updated with Alerts


Users of Google Scholar can set up alerts to stay updated about new advancements in their field of research. Initially, users must specify the topic or discipline of interest, provide their email address, and configure alert settings. This way, they will get a notification every time a paper related to their field is published.


Google Scholar metrics


Google Scholar metrics provide a suitable way to evaluate the visibility and impact of recent articles.


Author profiles on Google Scholar


Author profiles allow scholars, researchers, and professionals to showcase their publications.

  • Citations: the authors can check the citations on their articles; Google Scholar tracks the number of times an article is cited and automatically updates your profile if any of the articles of the user is mentioned.
  • H-index: this metric is calculated based on the highest number of articles published by an author and the number of publications with the same number of citations. h index attempts to evaluate both the productivity and impact of the author's publication.

i10-index: this metric indicates the number of publications by an author with at least 10 citations.

For Journals:

Google Scholar Metrics can help evaluate how various journals compare within their field or subject. Journals are ranked based on the h5 - index and the h5- median.
Users can access this list of journals ranked by h5iindex and h5-median on the Google Scholars website and even narrow down the search based on subject and specific field. Google Scholar provides a page for each journal where researchers and scholars can find information related to the journal's metrics, such as h5-index and h5-median. This page also includes the list of most cited articles from the journal.

  • h5-index: h5-index is a journal metric similar to the h-index for authors. It measures the impact of articles published in the journal. It identifies the highest number of articles "h" published by the journal, each being cited at least "h" number of times over a specified period. (Typically over the last 5 years)
  • h5-median: h5-median offers an understanding of the typical level of citation activity within a journal. It provides insight into the distribution of citations across articles and calculates the median number of citations received by the articles.

Google Scholar metrics cover many fields, such as Life Sciences & Earth Sciences, Food Science & Technology, Sustainable Energy, Public Health, Business, Economics & Management, and Chemical & Material Sciences. It excludes journals with less than 100 articles or no citations in the specified years. 2022 Nature Publications emerged as the top publishing platform according to these metrics.


Research topics of Google Scholar


One of the advantages of using Google Scholar is that researchers, scholars, and professionals can effectively choose research topics. To effectively choose a topic it is important to ensure that the same research is not conducted somewhere else, for this purpose, Google Scholar plays an important role. With the vast amount of data and literature available through Google Scholar, one can easily surf through various articles in their respective field and choose a suitable topic. It has a vast amount of data on fields such as medicine and healthcare, science and engineering, social sciences, humanities, business and economics, environmental studies, and arts. Students can explore vast disciplines such as Medicine and Healthcare and subtopics such as epidemiology, public health, and clinical trials according to their field and interest.


Advantages of Using Google Scholar

  •  Google Scholar can help various students and scholars with their theses and dissertations
  • Regarding publishing research articles, Google Scholars can help boost worldwide visibility and accessibility by indexing articles, making them easily discoverable by researchers, scholars, and professionals around the globe.
  • Author profiles on Google Scholar provide a simple way for authors and researchers to keep track of their citations. This citation count is often used to measure published articles' impact or influence. Author profiles can also be made public; other authors and researchers will discover the respective authors.
  • Metrics provided by Google Scholar also help researchers and scholars evaluate and compare various journals within their fields or disciplines
  • Authors can browse up to 100 journals across various languages according to metrics such as h5-index and h-median, this information can be valuable when choosing a journal to submit an article.


Integrating Google Scholar with Other Tools


Google Scholar can be used by combining with some other tools and software such as:

  • Reference management software: software such as EndNote and Mendeley allows users to collect, organize, and cite academic references effectively
  • Software like Paperpile integrates seamlessly with Google Scholar. It keeps track of all the sources and allows to save references and PDFs directly from Google Scholar to a library, facilitating easy organization and access to research material when required.
  • Chrome extensions like Google Scholar PDF Reader make it easy to read PDFs. With features like citation links, one click gives a preview of the cited article and a computed table of contents, allowing the user to navigate the paper seamlessly.


Limitations of Google Scholar


Google Scholar has some limitations compared to curated, subscription-based academic databases like Scopus and Web of Science.
Google Scholar indexes a large amount of scholarly literature from various publishers. Still, due to this vast coverage, the credibility and quality of the material may vary compared to subscription-based academic databases with a pre-set and rigid policy for indexing.
Moreover, Google scholar, unlike curated databases such as Web of Science and Scopus, it doesn't catalog the information by professionals, instead it gets the information from various sources. So, it is essential to assess the credibility of sources linked to Google Scholar.


Conclusion


Google Scholar is a free-access search engine that sources its data from extensive scholarly literature, including academic journals, conference papers, theses, books, and patents. Thus, it is an indispensable tool for researchers and scholars, offering them vast information on diverse topics and disciplines.
It has a user-friendly interface, advanced searching options and filters, and features like author profiles and journal metrics. It has helped students and researchers, from selecting suitable research topics to citation tracking. It allows researchers to compare journals based on metrics such as the h5-index to select an appropriate journal to publish their research work.
Google Scholar also provides an option to integrate additional tools and software to ease the research work of scholars. Referencing tools such as EndNote, Mendeley, and PaperPile facilitate efficient citation management.
However, with all the advantages it is important to acknowledge that Google Scholar does not verify the sources and the search result may vary in credibility and accuracy, Thus it is important to double-check any resource picked from Google Scholar. Nevertheless, with many advantages and transformative potential, this platform remains an invaluable resource for scholars and researchers.