Google Scholar has many benefits to using it. First, it contains a lot of information — nobody knows how large its index is — and second, you can find things beyond Yale's collections, including a lot of gray literature that hasn't been published in a journal or as a scholarly book.
However, there are some pitfalls. The first pitfall is its inclusion of fake journals, which are scam publications that do not do real peer review and typically ask authors to pay vanity fees to publish. It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes between an up-and-coming journal and something that is a scam, and it really all comes down to whether or not peer review was done properly. The second pitfall is bad metadata, or scraping errors. Almost all of what is in Google Scholar is curated by web crawlers that harvest information. They sometimes make embarrassing errors, like misidentifying dates or applying incorrect author information based on something in a sidebar. If a journal website changes and something happens in its metadata, Google Scholar will reindex it without titles or other important information, and it will take 9-12 months to fix because there is no manual intervention. So be careful!
Beyond that, here are some important things to be aware of.
apple stem
and another for stem apple
, each in a different tab. The results appear in a different order — and some things are included or omitted — because all Google search products expect that you will type words in (roughly) ordinary sentence order. This is really unexpected for those of us who tack terms onto the end of our search when we don't see what we want!fuse
will match fuse, fuses, fusing, fused, but "fuse"
will match only fuse. Searching as a phrase, "chaos terrain"
, will make sure that the words in the phrase are treated as a unit.1990..1999
or 100..200
. Importantly, this is not a date lookup function. Adding a range of four-digit numbers will find dates, but it will also find any other four-digit numbers.exoplanet OR "extrasolar planet" OR "extrasolar planets"
— and please note that, as things in quotation marks don't get stemmed, we have to search for both the singular and the plural. "fluid inclusions" -Mars
or "fluid inclusions" -"Galilaei Crater"
."fluid inclusions" author:"benison, k"
.