Scope and character

Google Scholar is a free search engine for scholarly literature. It is by far the broadest — indexing journals, books, theses, preprints, reports and more — and it powers free Scholar Profiles with h-index and i10-index.

Strengths and limits

  • Strength: free, enormous coverage, great for finding full text and grey literature.
  • Limit: automated and uncurated — it can include low-quality or duplicate items, inflating counts; coverage is not transparent or stable.
Worked example — broad but unverified
Google Scholar might report a researcher’s citations as 2,000 versus 1,100 in Scopus. The extra 900 include valid items the others miss — and duplicates, predatory-journal cites, and student theses. Great for discovery; use with care for formal evaluation.

🔗 Learn more (free): Google Scholar

Try it
Run the same search in Google Scholar and one subscription database. What does Scholar find that the other misses — and is all of it trustworthy?

Self-check

Why is Google Scholar excellent for discovery but risky for formal evaluation?

© FRELIP, released under CC BY 4.0. Adapted in part from openly-licensed UNESCO (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO) and institutional research-support materials. Linked resources remain under their own licences. Curated by the FRELIP Open Courseware editorial team.

Última modificación: jueves, 4 de junio de 2026, 12:49