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 most peer-reviewed online journals of Europe and America's largest scholarly publishers,[citation needed] plus scholarly books and other non-peer reviewed journals. It is similar in function to the freely available CiteSeerX and getCITED. It also resembles the subscription-based tools,
Google Scholar allows users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether online or in libraries.[12] It indexes "full-text journal articles, technical reports, preprints, theses, books, and other documents, including selected Web pages that are deemed to be 'scholarly.'"[13] 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.[13] 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 journal appears in.
Since December 2006, it has provided links to both published versions and major open access repositories, but still does not cover those posted on individual faculty web pages;[citation needed] access to such self-archived non-subscription versions is now provided by a link to Google, where one can find such open access articles.
Through its "cited by" feature, Google Scholar provides access to abstracts of articles that have cited the article being viewed.[15] It is this feature in particular that provides the citation indexing previously only found in CiteSeer, Scopus and Web of Science. Through its "Related articles" feature, Google Scholar presents a list of closely related articles, ranked primarily by how similar these articles are to the original result, but also taking into account the relevance of each paper.[16]
As of July 2013, Google Scholar is not yet available to the Google AJAX API.
Google Scholar’s legal database of US cases is extensive. Users can search and read published opinions of US state appellate and supreme court cases since 1950, US federal district, appellate, tax and bankruptcy courts since 1923 and US Supreme Court cases since 1791.[15] Google Scholar embeds clickable citation links within the case and the How Cited tab allows lawyers to research prior case law and the subsequent citations to the court decision.
Limitations and criticism
Quality — Some searchers consider Google Scholar of comparable quality and utility to commercial databases. The reviews recognize that its "cited by" feature in particular poses serious competition to Scopus and Web of Science. An early study, from 2007, limited to the biomedical field, found citation information in Google Scholar to be "sometimes inadequate, and less often updated". The coverage of Google Scholar may vary by discipline compared to other general databases.
Matthew effect — Google Scholar puts high weight on citation counts in its ranking algorithm and therefore is being criticised for strengthening the Matthew effect; as highly cited papers appear in top positions they gain more citations while new papers hardly appear in top positions and therefore get less attention by the users of Google Scholar and hence fewer citations.
Incorrect field detection — Google Scholar has problems identifying publications on the arXiv preprint server correctly. Interpunctuation characters in titles produce wrong search results, and authors are assigned to wrong papers, which leads to erroneous additional search results. Some search results are even given without any comprehensible reason.[28][29]
Vulnerability to spam — Google Scholar is vulnerable to spam.[30][31] Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg demonstrated that citation counts on Google Scholar can be manipulated and complete non-sense articles created with SCIgen were indexed from Google Scholar.[32] They concluded that citation counts from Google Scholar should only be used with care especially when used to calculate performance metrics such as the h-index or impact factor. Google Scholar started computing an h-index in 2012 with the advent of individual Scholar pages.