To conclude, google scholar is a useful tool and can (should) be used. This holds true to keep track of research productivity for scholars, specially because of increased competition. However, it’s extremely important to be ethical. At times, google scholar add things to profile automatically.
This begs the query “Is Google Scholar a reliable source of information?”
Google Scholar’s coverage is is wide-ranging but not comprehensive. It can be a research source, but should not be the only source you use. Google Scholar does not provide the criteria for what makes its results “scholarly”.
Over the last few years, the usefulness of Google Scholar has really improved. But, is it as credible as other databases? Unfortunately it’s not that simple: Google Scholar’s purpose and function are just different from other databases. Google Scholar intends to be a place for researchers to start.
In my experience, Google Scholar is not a replacement for other library research databases (those available through EBSCOhost, Web of Science, etc.). These have particular strengths, and are essential tools. Google Scholar is useful not only as a supplement to these, but also because it has its own particular strengths.
What are some criticisms of Google Scholar?
An early criticism was that Google Scholar did not have the same coverage as other databases, but a 2017 study showed that this was no longer as much of an issue (Halevi, Moed, & Bar-Ilan, 2017). This database is a citation index, meaning you can search the number of times an article has been cited by other people.
What are some good uses of Google Scholar?
One good use of Google Scholar is that it incorporats a ranking algorithm that can be helpful when you are learning a new field: for example, if you search for “economic sociology” in Google Scholar, the list returns pages of important and central texts to the subfield, so you can quickly get a sense.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. In a single place, You can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books and abstracts etc from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
Does Google Scholar have good coverage of non-English sources?
In particular, Google has good coverage of non-English sources, as well as Open Access articles and those contained in institutional repositories! Some databases may not carry these, and this was a benefit found across articles published from 2012-2017 on Google Scholar’s coverage (Dewan, 2012; Halevi, Moed, & Bar-Ilan, 2017; Quint, 2015).