How to use Google Scholar: the ultimate guide

It's all done automatically, but most of the search results tend to be reliable scholarly sources. These researchers concluded that citation counts from Google Scholar should be used with care, especially when used to calculate performance metrics such as the h-index or impact factor, which is in itself a poor predictor of article quality. Large-scale longitudinal studies have found between 40 and 60 percent of scientific articles are available in full text via Google Scholar links. Elsevier journals have been included since mid-2007, when Elsevier began to make most of its ScienceDirect content available to Google Scholar and Google's web search. Google Scholar does not publish a list of journals crawled or publishers included, and the frequency of its updates is uncertain.

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• A Gmail account is one of several Google services you can use and save data with if you have a Google Account.
• Related articles shows similar items on the same topic area.
• If the Library doesn’t have a copy, check if another library has it and then request a copy from Interlibrary Loans.
• There will be times when full text of an e-journal article or book chapter is not available from the Library.
• A higher number suggests the item has made a bigger impact on this area of research but there can be many reasons – good and not so good – for citing another item.
• Since December 2006, it has provided links to both published versions and major open access repositories, including all those posted on individual faculty web pages and other unstructured sources identified by similarity.

Google Scholar (GS) is a free academic search engine that can be thought of as the academic version of Google. ASEO has been adopted by several organizations, among them Elsevier, OpenScience, Mendeley, and SAGE Publishing, to optimize their articles' rankings in Google Scholar. For several years, SEO has also been applied to academic search engines such as Google Scholar. In 2024, researchers found that Google Scholar was manipulatable through citation-purchasing services. Interpunctuation characters in titles produce wrong search results, and authors are assigned to wrong papers, which leads to erroneous additional search results. Google Scholar effect is a phenomenon when some researchers pick and cite works appearing in the top results on Google Scholar regardless of their contribution to the citing publication because they automatically assume these works' credibility and believe that editors, reviewers, and readers expect to see these citations.

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• Google Scholar automatically calculates and displays the individual’s total citation count, h-index, and i10-index.
• Google Scholar strives to include as many journals as possible, including predatory journals, which may lack academic rigor.
• Large-scale longitudinal studies have found between 40 and 60 percent of scientific articles are available in full text via Google Scholar links.
• Once you’re signed in, open your inbox to check your mail.
• If you are looking for a particular article and know the title, it is best to put it into quotes to look for an exact match.
• By default, account related notifications are sent to your new Gmail address, or to your non-Google email if you signed up with a different email address.

If you have the details of a relevant paper, a citation search can help you to identify other more up to date papers. Library databases such as CINAHL are more effective for searching by location. It is best to use Google Scholar along with library databases from the RCN library.

Referencing sources from Google Scholar

Google also included profiles for some posthumous academics, including Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman. A major enhancement was rolled out in 2012, with the possibility for individual scholars to create personal "Scholar Citations profiles". Around this period, sites with similar features such as CiteSeer, Scirus, and Microsoft Windows Live Academic search were developed.
We recommend that RCN members set Google Scholar to show RCN library content. There are some tips below to help you search more effectively and find relevant results. If the Library doesn’t have a copy, check if another library has it and then request a copy from Interlibrary Loans. When this happens, visiting another library that holds the item, or requesting an Inter-Library Loan, may be an option. Advice to help you optimise use of Google Scholar, Google Books and Google for your research and study.

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Improving your Google Scholar search

Individuals, logging on through a Google account with a bona fide address usually linked to an academic institution, can now create their own page giving their fields of interest and citations. Via the "metrics" button, it reveals the top journals in a field of interest, and the articles generating these journal's impact can also be accessed. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents. You can review our basic and advanced searching for academic sources guidance to help you create your own search within Google Scholar. You may also find sources that require a payment to view in full, as well as references to printed books and journals that are not available online. It will find journal articles, theses, books, book chapters, conference papers and other materials.

If you signed in to any Google product before, such as Gmail, Maps, or YouTube, you already have a Google Account. Learn how to avoid getting locked out of your account. A Gmail account is one of several Google services you can use and save data with if you have a Google Account. By providing accurate info, you can help keep your account secure and make our services more useful. When you create a Google Account, we ask for some personal info.
The practicality of manipulating h-index calculators by spoofing Google Scholar was demonstrated in 2010 by Cyril Labbe from Joseph Fourier University, who managed to rank "Ike Antkare" ahead of Albert Einstein by means of a large set of SCIgen-produced documents citing each other (effectively an academic link farm). tenobet However, a 2014 study estimates that Google Scholar can find almost 90% (approximately 100 million) of all scholarly documents on the Web written in English. A study looking at the biomedical field found citation information in Google Scholar to be "sometimes inadequate, and less often updated". 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. Google Scholar automatically calculates and displays the individual's total citation count, h-index, and i10-index. It is this feature in particular that provides the citation indexing previously only found in CiteSeer, Scopus, and Web of Science.