Psychology & Counselling

Using Google Scholar

Although Google Scholar is a useful search engine, it needs to be used with care and is not suitable as the principal search engine for your literature search (Gusenbauer & Haddaway, 2020). Scholar can be more useful as a tool to use just to skim around the literature at the beginning of the process, or as a last point of call to look to see if there’s anything you might have missed when searching the specialised databases.

There are a number of things to be aware of when it comes to searching Google Scholar:

1. The ability to filter search results is very limited. Whereas specialised databases include filters for things such as methodology, Scholar only lets you filter according to date of publication.
2. Scholar only displays the first 1000 results and it’s not clear how it relevance ranks and what exactly it indexes. Because of a lack of transparency with the search algorithm, “searches are never wholly replicable” (Bramer et al., 2016).
3. Scholar searches the full text of most of the content it indexes. As a result, it only requires your terms to appear once in the full text of the article for it to be returned in the search results. This will often lead to quite a significant number of search results that you will then need to filter.
4. Google Scholar also indexes non-scholarly works and it isn’t clear how it determines what is scholarly and to be included in the search results.
5. Google Scholar doesn’t index everything (Martín-Martín et al., 2021).

If you use Google Scholar, make sure you have it connected to the library catalogue following the guidelines in the video below.