Google Scholar is an online search engine that is freely accessible and allows you to search across a wide range of academic material. When searching for scholarly literature, we always advise using the library’s discovery tool, Hunter, or specialist bibliographic databases such as Medline or CINAHL, in the first instance. However, Google Scholar should not be dismissed as it can also be a helpful search tool, although there are certainly advantages and disadvantages to using it.
Advantages of using Google Scholar
Google Scholar is easy to use as it shares a similar interface to Google.
It is useful for locating grey literature such as white papers, conference proceedings and reports.
References can be imported into reference management software such as RefWorks.
Google Scholar can be linked to the SGUL library collection and the NHS Journals collection, which can be useful for identifying scholarly literature quickly.
Disadvantages of using Google Scholar
Google Scholar also contains unscholarly documents such as articles from pseudo-journals.
Full text articles are not always available.
It lacks the accuracy of searching bibliographic databases.
Google Scholar has limited functionality for narrowing search results and exporting results.
This 6-minute video shows you how to conduct a search in Google Scholar. Refer to the rest of this guide for specific tips and help.
