What is Google Scholar?

Google Scholar is a specialized search engine that broadly searches for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources, including a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, and universities. It uses crawlers the same way Google uses, except geared towards more scholarly resources.

Google Scholar is a place where researchers could start their journey, but it functions differently from usual academic databases. Its search is broad because of way how it indexes: “scholarly” databases purposefully index articles on specific disciplines and topics, while Google Scholars scans and makes visible webpages for scholarly material without the same level of human-based curation. It is important to know you should not rely on Google Scholar alone for your research process since it cannot reproduce all quality articles listed in scholarly databases.

What can I find on Google Scholar?

You can find several different items and materials on Google Scholar, such as:

• Journal Articles
• Technical Reports
• Books
• Conference Presentations
• Patents
• Case Law
• Author Metrics
• Journal Metrics
• H-Index

What is not available in Google Scholar’s inclusion criteria are: news, magazine articles, book reviews, and editorials. The content available is constantly updating, so at times, it isn’t as suitable for finding things like literature or systematic reviews. Also, Google Scholar doesn’t note the version of the materials it makes visible, so you might find articles that are in pre-print format or have not gone through the peer review process yet.

How to Access Journal Articles on Google Scholar

As a Western student, you can obtain articles on Google Scholar using the Get It @ Western application. You might have to configure your settings to let Google Scholar know you are part of the Western community, which you can do using the following steps:

1. Go to Google Scholar.
2. Click on the Table of Contents icon at the top of the page.
3. Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
4. Select Library Links from the menu down the left side of the page.
5. Enter Western University in the search box.

Click the checkbox beside Western University Library – Get it @ Western and click save.

Google Scholar Research Profile

When you create a Google Scholar citations profile, it helps you track your own citations and metrics. You are more discoverable when you have a public profile, as the profile will appear in search results for your name. You can control which articles are associated with your profile at any point. It is a way to promote yourself and your research, as well as increase your presence in Google Scholar Search Results.

If you want to learn more about article metrics with Google Scholar, check out Western Libraries Research Metrics page for more information!

Helpful Resources when Searching on Google Scholar

Content and Guidelines

• Indexing Guidelines and Parsers
• Google Scholar Content Coverage
• Or create your own library at Google Scholar Library