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Following on from last week's focus on databases, deserve it's own post because of its interdisciplinary nature and its ubiquity.

Friend or foe?

Google Scholar is well known to students and researchers. It has the immense coverage and ease of searching that you get with Google, plus the benefit of filtering out non-academic material. The drawback is that such a comprehensive index naturally returns an excess of results.

If you aren’t familiar with the tool, it is similar to many that you have access to through the Library, such as SCOPUS. The difference is that it is freely available. It indexes most academic journals and books (that have an online record), conference papers, theses, preprints (articles before they are typeset by a journal), technical reports, patents, and grey literature that wouldn’t necessarily appear in traditional databases.

So how can you manage your searches to return a usable number of results?

Before you get started you need to tell Scholar that you are a member of the University of Cambridge so that you get access to everything that we subscribe to. is available on the .

As I’ve emphasised before with other databases: ALWAYS use the advanced search option. This is located in the menu in the top left corner of the home screen. It gives you the flexibility to include phrases, synonyms, exclude irrelevant terms, and to limit by date, author and publication. If you still return too many results, consider revisiting your search terms. There are lots of tips on how to this from the .

When you have found something useful you can star it, which saves it to your library (provided you have a Google account). If we have access (and if you've set up Library Links) you’ll see a link to ejournals@cambridge on the right hand side of the entry. If the resource is freely available on the web, there may be a link to an HTML or PDF version instead/too.

If you want to use the entry as a springboard to find related resources, click ‘Cited by’ to find out who has referenced the work, or click on ‘Related articles’ to see a list of 101 articles that share at least one reference with the entry in question (they are in order of ‘relevance’, but the exact formula for ranking these is a Google secret). It also connects to Web of Science for comparison of citations.

There are limits to the tool

It doesn’t work well with a traditionalusing AND, OR, NOT and lots of brackets. You’ll need to use the Advanced screen to input these terms into the correct boxes.
You don’t get to see all your results. It might claim that it has found 122,000 results but you are limited to seeing 1000 of these (10 per page for 100 pages). Use the date range option to work around this, viewing results in 10, 5 or even yearly blocks.

The order in which you see results isn’t only based upon keywords, but also the other metrics it lists (citations, publisher, publication etc.) and it is not clear as to where weightings lie. You’ll have to use your evaluative skills to establish the relevance of each article or book to your research. Plus what Google considers 'scholarly', may not match your definition.

Verdict

Google Scholar has great potential to find a broader range of material than any single that you have access to from the Library. However, it is not as nuanced in searching and so rarely returns usable number of results. You end up having to do a  lot of work weeding through results.

We suggest that you use it to compliment other databases rather than in isolation, and it will be a valuable part of your suite of searching tools.