To meet their information needs, doctoral students rely more and more on general search engines; Google
accounted for 76%. However, there was also a remarkable use of other search engines: Google Scholar 21.3%, Bing
14%, Scirus 14.3% and Yahoo 25.2%.
As we mentioned before, doctoral students have a preference for the most direct access to information. Although
Google is considered the default search engine, recent studies show that despite the visible power of Google, it
remains non-specialised and does not allow references to specific articles to be found (Niu & et al., 2010).