learning tool 6: Google Scholar

• Description of Google Scholar.

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, users can search across many disciplines and sources such as articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps user find relevant work across the world scholarly research.

Stand on the shoulders of giants.

Google Scholar aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature.

• Features of Google Scholar

1. Books and articles together.

Not only do scholarly articles show up in search results, selected books also appear. There is no way of eliminating the books and just retrieving articles. On the other hand, the books inherit the features of Google Scholar such as sources that cite the book and the ability to cite the book in the three major citation styles by clicking the "Cite" link. 

2. Getting full text of articles.

In Google Scholar, users can get a full text articles to which the University Libraries has subscribes simply by a click. Users can click the link on the right side of the screen. 

3. Accessibility

Searching in Google Scholar is as easy as searching in regular Google. Google Scholar returns the most relevant results first, based on an item's full text, author, source and the number of times it has been cited in other sources. Some actions are a little different from regular Google; clicking on a title may only take you to a citation or description, rather than to the full document itself. If you find the articles or case law that you search for, you can download the document. 

• Benefits of Google Scholar in teaching and learning. 

1. Google Scholar is a reliable search tool to browse or access some of the academic literature. It is the only the general free tool for academic literature that we have and in an easy-to-use familiar interface. It would benefit for lecturers and teachers when they need to do a research and need a reference. Plus, Google Scholar can provide some articles for teacher's teaching tools in class. 

2. Journal publishers crawled and made searchable, end users like educators and students can search about 500 million discreet files, pages and journal articles. This would be benefit both educators and students the most as in globalization era, we do everything simply on our fingertips. 

3. Google Scholar is a handy tool to locate the open-access and grey literature. Educators and students can search their academic reference for their assignments and research not only on laptop or PCs, but also can be search on mobile devices. 

Guidelines on getting started with Google Scholar.


1. Individual authors.

If you're an individual author, it works best to simply upload your paper to your website, and add a link to it on your publications page. Make sure that:

• the full text of your paper is in a PDF file that ends with ".pdf", 
• the title of the paper appears in a large font on top of the first page, 
• the authors of the paper are listed right below the title on a separate line, and 
• there's a bibliography section titled, e.g., "References" or "Bibliography" at the end. 

Google Scholar search robots should normally find your paper and include it in Google Scholar within several weeks.

2. Journal publishers. 

If you publish a small number of journals, consider using one of the established journal hosting services, e.g., Atypon and Highwire. Aggregators that host many journals on a single website, such as JSTOR or SciELO, often work too, but please check with your aggregator to make sure that they support full-text indexing in Google Scholar. Alternatively, if you have the technical expertise to manage your own website, we recommend the Open Journal Systems (OJS) software that's available for download from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP).

If you use a smaller journal hosting service, or if you maintain your own custom website, please read this entire documentation and make sure that your website meets our technical guidelines.