Google Scholar

Google Scholar
Google Scholar home page
Type of site
Bibliographic database
OwnerGoogle
URLscholar.google.com
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedNovember 20, 2004; 20 years ago (2004-11-20)
Current statusActive

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. 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.[1]

Google Scholar uses a web crawler, or web robot, to identify files for inclusion in the search results.[2] For content to be indexed in Google Scholar, it must meet certain specified criteria.[3] An earlier statistical estimate published in PLOS One using a mark and recapture method estimated approximately 79–90% coverage of all articles published in English with an estimate of 100 million.[4] This estimate also determined how many online documents were available. Google Scholar has been criticized for not vetting journals and for including predatory journals in its index.[5]

The University of Michigan Library and other libraries whose collections Google scanned for Google Books and Google Scholar retained copies of the scans and have used them to create the HathiTrust Digital Library.[6][7]

  1. ^ "Search Tips: Content Coverage". Google Scholar. Archived from the original on 23 September 2016. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  2. ^ "Google Scholar Help". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2021-09-01.
  3. ^ "Google Scholar Help". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2021-09-01.
  4. ^ Trend Watch (2014) Nature 509(7501), 405 – discussing Madian Khabsa and C Lee Giles (2014) The Number of Scholarly Documents on the Public Web Archived 2014-08-30 at the Wayback Machine, PLOS One 9, e93949.
  5. ^ Kolata, Gina (30 October 2017). "Many Academics Are Eager to Publish in Worthless Journals". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 8 November 2017. Retrieved 2 November 2017.
  6. ^ "UM Library/Google Digitization Partnership FAQ, August 2005" (PDF). University of Michigan Library. August 2005. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-09-22. Retrieved 2021-04-30. [T]he University of Michigan's work with Google encompasses several activities and Google products (e.g., Google Scholar).
  7. ^ Jennifer Howard (10 August 2017). "What Happened to Google's Effort to Scan Millions of University Library Books?". EdSurge. Archived from the original on 2017-08-10. Retrieved 2021-04-30.