Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Getting started on Google scholar library click here

Features of Google Scholar

  • Search all scholarly literature from one convenient place
  • Explore related works, citations, authors, and publications
  • Locate the complete document through your library or on the web
  • Keep up with recent developments in any area of research
  • Check who’s citing your publications, create a public author profile

Google Scholar Citations

Google Scholar Citations provide a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name.

Google Scholar Metrics

Google Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Scholar Metrics summarize recent citations to many publications, to help authors as they consider where to publish their new research.

Finding your h-index (Hirsch index) in Google Scholar

What is the h-index?

The h-index is an index that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the published body of work of a scientist or scholar (an author-level metric). The index is based on the set of the scientist’s most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications.

Using Google Scholar for the h-index

  • Benefits
    • Covers a wider range of sources, (especially conferences, technical reports and eprints).
    • Easier to calculate some of the less common metrics (since it is not linked to proprietary data).
  • Disadvantages
    • Maybe considered less authoritarian resources than Web of Science.
    • More difficult to search when there are multiple authors with the same family name & initials-limited options to refine
    • There may be duplication of results, so check carefully.
    • Coverage is primarily medical, scientific, and technical.
    • Coverage is primarily English language.

Google scholar Search Tips

Get the most out of Google Scholar with some helpful tips on searches, email alerts, citation export, and more.

Finding recent papers

Your search results are normally sorted by relevance, not by date. To find newer articles, try the following options in the left sidebar:

  1. click “Since Year” to show only recently published papers, sorted by relevance;
  2. click “Sort by date” to show just the new additions, sorted by date;
  3. Click the envelope icon to have new results periodically delivered by email.

Locating the full text of an article

Abstracts are freely available for most of the articles. Alas, reading the entire article may require a subscription. Here’re a few things to try:

  1. click a library link, e.g., “FindIt@Harvard”, to the right of the search result;
  2. click a link labeled [PDF] to the right of the search result;
  3. click “All versions” under the search result and check out the alternative sources;
  4. Click “Related articles” or “Cited by” under the search result to explore similar articles.

If you’re affiliated with a university, but don’t see links such as “FindIt@Harvard”, please check with your local library about the best way to access their online subscriptions. You may need to do search from a computer on campus, or to configure your browser to use a library proxy.

Getting better answers

  • If you’re new to the subject, it may be helpful to pick up the terminology from secondary sources. E.g., a Wikipedia article for “overweight” might suggest a Scholar search for “pediatric hyperalimentation”.
  • If the search results are too specific for your needs, check out what they’re citing in their “References” sections. Referenced works are often more general in nature.
  • Similarly, if the search results are too basic for you, click “Cited by” to see newer papers that referenced them. These newer papers will often be more specific.
  • Explore! There’s rarely a single answer to a research question. Click “Related articles” or “Cited by” to see closely related work, or search for author’s name and see what else they have written.