Sure, Google scholar is ideal for some things

See also Google scholar bibliography ~115 articles as of May 2010

Five (5) years after its beta release and after many heated debates among librarians about its usefulness, Google scholar (GS) continues to be viewed as a controversial search tool within the academic community. In 2010, its ease-of-access and simple interface have continued to make it a popular choice among students and academics alike.

So, why is it so popular? For one, the interface is familiar, classic Google. GS also links to several million digital Google Books and hard to find items in mainstream tools. Its total size is probably nearing one (1) billion documents in 2010, making it the largest search tool ever conceived for scholarly journal searching.

GS is useful for locating peer-reviewed journal content and grey literature produced by government and other agencies. GS now includes Elsevier journals, JSTOR and many other publishers in its database. GS is comparable to CiteSeer and has much of the content of other open search tools (and then some). GS points to more websites, journals and languages than any of its competitors; as such, it is ideal for browsing or pre-searching. Its tagline – “Stand on the shoulders of giants” – is a nod to scientists who have contributed to the scholarly literature. American LIS professor, Peter Jacso, is the most cited academic writing about Google scholar.

Search features

GS provides easy searchability in classic Google fashion — pop in a few keywords and start browsing. GS locates born digital content and points to articles online and on library shelves (see library links). Its “All versions” feature provides access to free-fee fulltext (preprints and early drafts) and its handy “Cited by” feature links to articles that cite the one being viewed. “Related articles” presents lists of closely-related articles and ranks them. In response to the release of Academic Search, an importing feature was included for RefWorks, Reference Manager, EndNote, and BibTeX in 2007 (see citing). GS has a pull-down menu in the search display to limit searches to a given range of years. In 2010, U.S. legal opinions and cases were made searchable by clicking the appropriate radio buttons on the front page; e-mail alerts are now available from the results display.

Pluses & minuses

• same search operators and “limits” as in Mother Google
• easy to search for academic journals and grey literature
• as of 2010, patents, legal opinions and law journals are searchable; e-mail alerts can be set up
• some papers are only available to subscribers (unless open access)
• citations are determined to be scholarly by Google (not by scholars or librarians)
• total # of journals and coverage is unknown; many scholarly journals are not indexed
• cannot do proper, structured literature reviews because there is no “history“
• more coverage in sciences than humanities
• older material ranked higher, usually
• “Cited by” (citation searching) is useful but numbers may be inflated compared to Scopus or Web of Science
• sorting, browsing and exporting all citations at the same time are not available

Quality, content

Some searchers consider GS of comparable value to commercial databases despite remaining in beta, and others say it is hampered by poor design and quality control. When searching for items based on publication dates, for example, results are inflated and unreliable; other features such as the citation tracking numbers are also inflated. The number of articles found in some searches increases instead of decreases when limiting to year ranges (ie. 2000-2006). Some critics say that GS has a counterintuitive presentation of results. One problem is the secrecy about GS’ coverage and its refusal to publish what journals it crawls. It is impossible to know how current or exhaustive your searches are by using GS. That said, GS finds favour with undergraduates who need a few good articles and who want searching to be on the open web – and simple.

User-friendly as a browsing tool

GS is an ideal vehicle for browsing the academic side of the web. Several librarians have studied its potential as a research tool with the general conclusion that it cannot compete with the power and flexibility of other interfaces. Some librarians ask what content can be retrieved from GS but Google has never released this information to the library community – thus, librarians are left to make educated guesses about its coverage. The consensus seems to be that GS is not as current or comprehensive as some tools but offers a quick way to do interdisciplinary searching. Being aware of its strengths and weaknesses will help librarians in recommending it to users appropriately.