
Google Scholar – Your Most Reliable Partner in Research
When to Use Google Scholar
Google Scholar is very resourceful in the early stages of a research process. You can take advantage of a lot of information from your discipline of interest. It is also useful to people who are new to the research process since it allows the use of natural language in the search terms.
Another practical scenario is when you are gathering some background information about a topic, and you want to narrow down before perusing the library databases. It can save you the agony of searching all over without a precise focal point.
By using Google Scholar, you can identify keywords and phrases relevant to your research. You will also know whether there are any other articles which have cited a resource which you think will be handy for your research project.
Optimization Features
The free search engine provides users with physical and digital copies of materials in libraries or online. Apart from documented articles, it includes specific web pages that are scholarly in nature. Most of the search results refer users to commercial journal articles. You will probably only access an abstract and citation details of the item, and pay a fee if you want to read the entire article.
The search results feature the most relevant articles to your search terms. The priority of the outcome depends on the author’s ranking, significance to other scholarly literature, the number of references linking to it, and the ranking of the work in which the journal appears.
The ‘Group of’ feature of Google Scholar shows the links associated with a journal article, such as published versions and main open access works. You can access individual faculty web pages through the Google link provided.
Using its ‘Cited by’ feature, the search engine shows the abstracts of publications which have cited the journal being viewed. This feature also provides citation indexing in a similar way to Web Science, CiteSeer, and Scopus.
The ‘Related articles’ section highlights a list of articles which are closely related. The feature analyzes the similarity between the original result and other relevant content.

Google Scholar has an extensive legal database of US legal cases. Users can access and read opinions of the United States federal district, Supreme Court and Court of Appeals cases, and tax and bankruptcy litigation cases. The search engine embeds citation hyperlinks within each case.
Advantages of Google Scholar
- It is relatively user-friendly. Anyone familiar with modern search engines like Google can comfortably operate Google Scholar.
- Google Scholar provides an extensive database of materials from a wide range of disciplines. It presents information in various forms such as books, journals, articles, and gray literature.
- It allows users to see articles related to the ones they are viewing, who have cited them, and how many times.
- It presents citations for articles in various styles. Users can save the references for the future.
- Google Scholar can give links to materials held by ECU Libraries. You can find more information about this at the ‘Using Google Scholar from Home’ section.
- It searches full text for phrases and keywords in natural language.
One limitation with most academic databases is that they sort their findings based on one factor such as relevance, publication date, or the number of citations. Google Scholar, on the other hand, mimics human-based research methodologies. It balances the text of each article with the author’s ranking, where it appears, and the frequency of citation in other scholarly publications. This intelligent ranking algorithm enables Google Scholar to provide valid and refined results.