academic research papers search engine

A free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature

• Jean Louise Cohen
• Inheritance Tax
• Coronary Artery Disease

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Introducing semantic reader in beta.

Stay Connected With Semantic Scholar Sign Up What Is Semantic Scholar? Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at the Allen Institute for AI.

Stand on the shoulders of giants

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.

How are documents ranked?

Google Scholar aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature.

Features of Google Scholar

• Search all scholarly literature from one convenient place
• Explore related works, citations, authors, and publications
• Locate the complete document through your library or on the web
• Keep up with recent developments in any area of research
• Check who's citing your publications, create a public author profile

Disclaimer: Legal opinions in Google Scholar are provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied on as a substitute for legal advice from a licensed lawyer. Google does not warrant that the information is complete or accurate.

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🇺🇦    make metadata, not war

A comprehensive bibliographic database of the world’s scholarly literature

The world’s largest collection of open access research papers, machine access to our vast unique full text corpus, core features, indexing the world’s repositories.

We serve the global network of repositories and journals

Comprehensive data coverage

We provide both metadata and full text access to our comprehensive collection through our APIs and Datasets

Powerful services

We create powerful services for researchers, universities, and industry

Cutting-edge solutions

We research and develop innovative data-driven and AI solutions

Committed to the POSI

Cost-free PIDs for your repository

OAI identifiers are unique identifiers minted cost-free by repositories. Ensure that your repository is correctly configured, enabling the CORE OAI Resolver to redirect your identifiers to your repository landing pages.

OAI IDs provide a cost-free option for assigning Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) to your repository records. Learn more.

Who we serve?

Enabling others to create new tools and innovate using a global comprehensive collection of research papers.

“ Our partnership with CORE will provide Turnitin with vast amounts of metadata and full texts that we can ... ” Show more

Gareth Malcolm, Content Partner Manager at Turnitin

Academic institutions.

Making research more discoverable, improving metadata quality, helping to meet and monitor open access compliance.

“ CORE’s role in providing a unified search of repository content is a great tool for the researcher and ex... ” Show more

Nicola Dowson, Library Services Manager at Open University

Researchers & general public.

Tools to find, discover and explore the wealth of open access research. Free for everyone, forever.

“ With millions of research papers available across thousands of different systems, CORE provides an invalu... ” Show more

Jon Tennant, Rogue Paleontologist and Founder of the Open Science MOOC

Helping funders to analyse, audit and monitor open research and accelerate towards open science.

“ Aggregation plays an increasingly essential role in maximising the long-term benefits of open access, hel... ” Show more

Ben Johnson, Research Policy Adviser at Research England

Our services, access to raw data.

Create new and innovative solutions.

Content discovery

Find relevant research and make your research more visible.

Managing content

Manage how your research content is exposed to the world.

Companies using CORE

Gareth Malcolm

Content Partner Manager at Turnitin

Our partnership with CORE will provide Turnitin with vast amounts of metadata and full texts that we can utilise in our plagiarism detection software.

Academic institution using CORE

Kathleen Shearer

Executive Director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)

CORE has significantly assisted the academic institutions participating in our global network with their key mission, which is their scientific content exposure. In addition, CORE has helped our content administrators to showcase the real benefits of repositories via its added value services.

Partner projects

Ben Johnson

Research Policy Adviser

Aggregation plays an increasingly essential role in maximising the long-term benefits of open access, helping to turn the promise of a 'research commons' into a reality. The aggregation services that CORE provides therefore make a very valuable contribution to the evolving open access environment in the UK.

Reference management. Clean and simple.

Academic Databases

ERIC research database: complete tutorial

The ERIC database is the premier education literature database for scholarly research. This guide covers search types and strategies, filters, and full text options.

How to efficiently search online databases for academic research

Academic research isn't difficult if you know where and how to search for scholarly articles and research papers. Here's how to do it.

How to use Google Scholar: the ultimate guide

Google Scholar is the number one academic search engine. Our detailed guide covers best practices for basic and advanced search strategies in Google Scholar.

Is Google Scholar a database or search engine? [Update 2024]

Google Scholar is the number one free resource to discover scientific literature, but is it an academic database or a search engine?

The best academic research databases [Update 2024]

Your research is stuck and you need to find new sources? Take a look at our compilation of academic research databases: Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, ERIC, JSTOR, DOAJ, Science Direct, and IEEE Xplore.

The best academic search engines [Update 2024]

Your research is stuck, and you need to find new sources. Take a look at our compilation of free academic search engines: ✓ Google Scholar ✓ BASE ✓ CORE ✓ Science.gov

The best research databases for computer science [Update 2024]

The top 4 research databases specifically dedicated to computer science: ✓ ACM Digital Library ✓ IEEE Xplore ✓ dbpl ✓ Springer LNCS

The best research databases for healthcare and medicine [Update 2024]

We have compiled the top list of research databases for healthcare, medicine, and biomedical research: PubMed, EMBASE, PMC, and Cochrane Library.

Bibliometrics

Learn how to calculate your h-index on Google Scholar

Learn how to calculate your h-index using Google Scholar online for free, and which tools to use for a detailed analysis.

Learn how to calculate your h-index using Scopus [3 steps]

Learn how to assess your h-index on Scopus in 3 easy steps.

Learn how to calculate your h-index using Web of Science

Learn how to calculate your h-index using Web of Science in 3 easy steps.

The ultimate how-to-guide on the h-index

Learn what an h-index is, how to calculate it, and why it is important to know about it for your career as a scientist.

What is a good h-index? [with examples]

Curious to know what a good h-index is? Read this guide to learn when an h-index is considered good.

What is a good impact factor?

Do you want to find out what a good impact factor is? Read this guide to learn what an impact factor is, how it is calculated, and what impact factor is considered good.

Credible Sources

Can a blog be a credible source? [Update 2024]

You want to add a blog post to your research paper? In general, blogs are not considered to be credible sources: ➜ check out these reasons to learn more about it.

How can I find credible sources? [7 tips]

Sometimes it is hard to determine whether a source is credible or not. Read our guide to help you find credible sources.

Is Wikipedia a credible source?

We all ❤ Wikipedia, but can you cite it in your research paper? No. Wikipedia is not a credible source, and here is why you should only use it for preliminary research.

What are credible sources?

Credible sources are sources that are trustworthy and can be used as references in your academic papers. This guide will help you identify and evaluate sources for their credibility.

What are predatory journals?

This day and age, you have to be careful where you submit your work for publication. This article helps you spot a predatory journal and has tips and tricks on what to do if you accidentally submitted to one.

Primary and Secondary Sources

Interviews: are they a primary source?

Interviews can add tremendously to your research project. Read on to quickly learn when an interview is considered a primary source.

Is a documentary a secondary source? [with examples]

You are not sure if a documentary is a secondary source? We show you when and why is a documentary either a secondary or a tertiary source.

Is a letter a primary source?

Letters are frequently used in historical research. Read on to see when a letter qualifies as a primary source.

Is a map a primary source? [with examples]

Are you not sure if a map is a primary source? This guide will show you when and why a map is a primary or a secondary source.

Is a painting a primary source? [with examples]

Are you unsure if a painting is a primary source? This guide will show you when and why a painting is either a primary or a secondary source.

Is a textbook a secondary source?

Are you unsure if a textbook is a secondary source? Learn in this guide when and why a textbook is either a primary, secondary, or tertiary source.

Is an autobiography a primary source?

Are you not sure if an autobiography is a primary source? We show you when and why an autobiography is either a primary or secondary source.

Is an encyclopedia a primary source?

Are you unsure if an encyclopedia is a primary source? Find your answer and learn the right way to reference an encyclopedia in this guide.

Is census data a primary source?

You are not sure if census data is a primary source? We will show you when and why census data is a primary source and where to get it.

Is the US Constitution a primary source?

Are you wondering if the US Constitution is a primary source? Find the answer to your question in this guide.

Newspaper articles: primary or secondary sources?

Learn what questions to ask to see if a newspaper article really qualifies as a primary source.

Primary vs. secondary sources: how to distinguish them

Primary and secondary sources are the foundations of every research project. Learn about their differences and when to use them.

What is a primary source?

Primary sources are the most important sources when undertaking a research project. We answer the 5 most asked questions about primary sources.

What is a secondary source?

Secondary sources are your starting point when undertaking a research project. We answer the 5 most asked questions about secondary sources.

Research Methodology

How to do a content analysis [7 steps]

Content analysis is a research method you might come across when analyzing data. Learn what a content analysis is and how to do one in this step-by-step guide.

How to do a thematic analysis [6 steps]

A thematic analysis is a research method you might come across when analyzing qualitative data. Learn what a thematic analysis is and how to write one in this step-by-step guide.

How to write a rhetorical analysis [4 steps]

A rhetorical analysis explores the goals and motivations of an author, the techniques they’ve used to reach their audience, and how successful these techniques were. Learn how to write an excellent rhetorical analysis in this guide.

Qualitative vs. quantitative research - what’s the difference?

Qualitative and quantitative research are effective but very different approaches to study a subject. Learn the difference between them, what they are used for, and how to analyze qualitative and quantitative research in this guide.

What is research methodology? [Update 2024]

Having the right research methodology can be a make-or-break factor for your academic work. What is research methodology, and how can you get ahead?

Scholarly Sources

How to find a DOI [Update 2024]

Are you not sure where to find a DOI? Read this guide to learn exactly where to spot DOIs, and how to include them in your citations!

How to identify if a source is scholarly

Not sure if it is a scholarly source? Looking at these 6 identifiers can help differentiate scholarly from non-scholarly articles.

How to know if an article is peer reviewed [6 key features]

You don't know exactly what 'peer reviewed' articles are? Read this guide to learn all about peer reviewed articles, their features, and how to find them!

Is a book a scholarly source? [with checklist]

Sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish scholarly from non-scholarly books. This guide will help you with that. Learn how to identify scholarly books by following our simple guidelines.

What are peer reviewed journals? [Update 2024]

You don't know exactly what 'peer review' means? Read this guide to clear your doubts, and learn more about peer reviewed articles, its process and types!

What is a DOI [with examples]

What is a DOI? Learn what a digital object identifier is and how to include a DOI in APA and other styles.

What is a scholarly source?

Are you wondering what a scholarly source is and what makes it a scholarly source? Learn all about it in this guide, including what elements a scholarly source generally contains.

What is grey literature? [with examples]

Wondering what is grey literature and how to find it? Find all things grey literature in this quick and easy guide filled with sources for grey literature.

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Google Scholar: Every Researcher's Go-To Guide

Table of Contents

When Google was officially launched as a web-based search engine, none of us would have thought it could address academicians' research discovery problems via "Google Scholar."

The launch of Google Scholar in November 2004 took the scholarly communication world by storm by authenticating the true meaning of Google, i.e., "largest information resource."

At first, researchers worldwide acknowledged this new product of Google intended to empower research by transforming the research-finding process. Over the years, with the advent of gaming, inaccurate citation counts, no periodic data updates, and other platform-centric concerns ascended gradually. As a result, many users started questioning the reliability of the platform. Consequently, some users request feature updates with advanced search options or services, while others dig into the sources' credibility. Meanwhile, the budding research scholars are still wondering if it is a reliable academic search engine or if they should rely on other exhaustive search engines like Web of Science, Scopus, and SciSpace.

To help all the researchers, including students, authors, and professors across academia, we have created a comprehensive guide on using Google Scholar. It provides a synopsis of the platform, centralizing its features, limitations, strengths, weaknesses, and future pursuits.

Introduction to Google Scholar searches

It indexes all scientific papers, including full-text and subscription-based content from major academic publishers, universities, digital repositories, and other commercial publishers. It also includes grey literature that is available online. In short, it helps you find relevant scientific works that hasten your scholarly projects.

It covers a wide range of research subjects, including STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine) and Social studies (Education and Counseling) in a broader spectrum. On the other hand, it comprises a modest amount of research content or consists of the fewest papers subjected to Humanities (Religion and Biblical Studies). In addition to scholarly literature, it indexes legal documents, as court opinions, case law reports, and patent data about the law.

How does the Google Scholar crawling work?

Google Scholar uses a web crawler or a web robot to crawl the particular journal's consented content from the Online Computer Library Center's (OCLC) Open WorldCat and the National Library of Medicine's PubMed.

Major publishers or universities deliberately want to get crawled by this database. Because of the readership and significant discoverability that the ingested content receives by getting indexed in the search engine.

History of Google Scholar

The idea of building a dedicated scholarly search engine arose amidst a discussion between two tech guys, Alex Verstak and Anurag Acharya, on their sabbatical leave. The agenda behind their sabbatical leave was to identify an approach or a way to rank scholarly papers higher and easier on Google scholar search itself. Initially, their idea wasn't just to find an indexing database but to feed the academic community with intent queries with quality research reports. Accordingly, they built an internal prototype. The prototype witnessed constructive feedback, and people tried and acknowledged the results. And that's how it turned out to be "Scholar," aka Google Scholar search engine. To reinforce easy and unrestricted access to scientific knowledge, they decided to roll out the beta version of it in November 2004. The publicizing strategy included the slogan "Stand on the shoulders of giants" from Bernard of Chartres, quoted by Isaac Newton. The saying unveils the fact that using Google Scholar to search will be the foundation of your future scientific innovation and discovery.

As the product was familiarized, the inventors released new features to help research scholars worldwide. Thus, they introduced the following series of updates to the platform.

• 2006: A citation importing feature was enforced to support the reference database, such as RefWorks, RefMan, EndNote, and BibTeX.
• 2007: A program was initiated to digitize and host journal articles online in agreement with their publishers. It was an effort to distinguish Google Books that indexes the older literature without the metadata .
• 2011: The "Scholar" was detached from Google to promote a smoother user transition from the home page to its landing page.
• 2012: They reached a significant milestone by providing the authors a platform to create their profiles under "Scholar Citations profiles" and start tracking their research articles' metrics.
• 2013 : Introduced "Google Scholar library" that allows researchers to save their search results, or it can be called the authors' personalized collection tab for their references.

What is the Ranking Algorithm of the Google Scholar?

Unlike other search engines, it searches for a publication using a combined ranking algorithm guarded by multiple factors, including relevance, citation counts, and publication date. Predominantly the algorithm scale is drawn toward citation counts and relevance.

For example, when people search for any particular keyword, author, or year, it shows relevant papers based on the highest citation counts, which makes it the primary ranking factor.

But, the algorithm rituals don't always stick to the citation counts. It works "the way researchers do — weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature." So, besides citation counts, it also gives prominence to the article title length and other factors similar to a researcher's search mechanism.

How does Google Scholar choose and include the sources?

A study compared Web of Science and Scopus databases with Google Scholar search to review the approach of coverage and inclusion of the scholarly content.

Web of Science and Scopus uses a selective approach based on specific criteria and crawls only the appropriate or selective, scholarly articles and academic resources, from the web. It follows a comprehensive and automated inclusion technique and indexes academic documents that its robot crawlers can locate on the web. As a result, these databases only include a small portion of the social sciences and humanities, non-English literature, and scholarly texts while majorly focusing on science journal articles. Conversely, the inclusive and unsupervised methodology used by Google Scholar indexes all the academic literature available on the web without any sieving of the sources. Thus, it maximizes the coverage and discoverability of both the authors and papers. However, this could also be one of the shortcomings of the database because of the lack of source evaluation. But, it still plays a vital role in boosting the discoverability of all papers.

What are the advantages of the Google Scholar search engine?

It helps us retrieve research articles and aids in inventing research works for the advancement of science.   The advantages of using Google Scholar include:

• It is relatively easy to use and user-friendly , retrieving desired user-intent documents in no time.
• It allows the author to search for all forms of scholarly literature on various topics, including grey literature like conference proceedings.
• The results surpass the search-intent query keyword , i.e., it provides additional and other keyword-associated information and helps the user to learn more.
• You can access an abundance of knowledge at your fingertips.
• You can explore other authors' profiles, publications, citations, and related publications.
• Find the whole document or shortlist it in your library.
• You can stay up to date with the latest scientific development in your research area by creating alerts (which is located on the left column of the website).
• Create your academic profile and keep track of your research works citations.

How Google Scholar helps publishers?

Google had a superior association with the publishers in indexing their web content even before the launch of this scholarly indexing database. However, convincing the academic community and publishers to get their journal content crawled on the search engine was still challenging for the entire team.

The inflow of academic queries helped the team convince publishers about the traffic they would receive when their content gets indexed on Google Scholar. That way, it helps publishers to boost the visibility and accessibility rates of the content worldwide by making them readily discoverable. Since then, all the peer-reviewed articles, theses, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports from across multiple academic disciplines have been indexed by the platform in collaboration with publishers.

What is Academic Search Engine Optimization?

Like how search engine optimization works by making the web content rank higher on the search engine and search result page, ASEO is the process of optimizing scholarly papers to rank higher on the academic search engine. Most publishers and organizations are adopting ASEO to help them rank higher and increase the visibility of the research article. As a researcher/author, optimizing your papers for academic search engines is crucial. If you are a newbie to ASEO and want to gain more insights into ASEO; you can refer to the article " Optimizing Scholarly Articles For Academic Search Engines — Every Researcher's SEO Guide ," co-authored by Dr. Lisa Schillan.

What is the difference between Google, Google Books, and Google Scholar?

How to create a Google Scholar profile?

Creating a profile helps both the searchers and the readers in terms of disseminating knowledge. Researchers can keep track of their citations and h-index, increasing the paper's discoverability. Alternatively, readers can easily find relevant literature on the search engine. It also helps researchers showcase their publications and access Google Scholar and citations to the readers directly without hassle. The Google Scholar profile creation is easier and involves five simple steps to get an official account here.

1. Set up your account

Visit scholar.google.com , and click on the "My Profile" option at the top left of the page. It takes you to the next page and asks you to input your Name, Affiliation, Email address, Areas of interest, and university homepage (however, it is not mandatory); you can skip it.

2. Add your publications

You can either select "Group" searches or "Articles" by looking into the research articles listed. Since Google Scholar has been indexing all the scholarly works, it might be easier for you to choose your documents and add them to your publications.

Please note if you have selected the "Groups," there are chances the group might have articles that you do not author. You can delete them later manually once you have completed creating your account.

3. Make your profile "Public"

You're almost there! You need to pick the convenient options that work best for you regarding your article updates, profile visibility, and follow-by email. It's advisable to add a profile picture and make it public to increase your profile's visibility, discoverability, and publications. Note: You can change your profile visibility from "public" to "private" anytime. There you go! Your profile is completed, and you officially have your scholar account. So, you now have the profile; what next? Time to explore its features and specifications! Let's get to know them!

What are the features and specifications of Google Scholar?

It provides a decent set of features that aids in the author's publication primary discovery, management, and organization process.

The major features include:

• Save/My library: This allows you to save the relevant articles to your library.
• Cite: You can use the "Cite" feature to cite your current or future research works
• Cited by: By far, it is the quickest and fastest way to find out the citations of the research paper. It only shares the analytics of the times the research paper is cited in other works and provides access to the abstracts of the other articles that have cited this research paper.
• Related articles: Helps you find similar articles on your topic of interest
• All versions: As a reader, using this feature, you can explore the author's past versions of the research paper and keenly refer to the latest updates of the article.
• Create Alert: You can create instant alerts for the intended topics.
• Auto-add: It automatically updates all your latest publications to your profile. However, this can also lead to author ambiguity and show the wrong publications on your profile. But don't despair; you can manually remove unwanted articles from your profile.
• Add Co-authors: You can also add your co-authors who have already created their profiles on the platform and keep your profile and publications updated.

What is Google Scholar Button? (GS Button)

Google Scholar Button is a browser extension or plugin that provides direct access to the search Google Scholar from any webpage. It is a search button browser extension that helps you find and access google scholar for full-text research articles on the web page or in university libraries.

How does the Google Scholar Chrome Extension work?

• Install or add the extension to your browser.
• Search for any research articles using partial match keywords or exact phrase keywords on Google Scholar or on the university library database.
• Now, select the article title and click the GS button to find the article.
• You will get the article that you can save for later or click on the cite quotes option, choose the preferred references style, and export it in the required format.

The extension works differently for On-campus library links and Off-campus library links. You can customize the settings (click on the gear icon) to choose library links, and use the extension. It's easier to find open-access articles when you are on campus. However, linking your library to the Google Scholar library or search engine while off-campus would be most beneficial. Also, library links connect to Google Scholar also work great when you are on-campus. So, how do the students link their universities to google scholar searches or the search engine? Let's unfold!

How to link your University school library to Google Scholar?

The advantages are more rhetorical when you link your university library to Google Scholar, as you can gain unrestricted access to the full-length articles and other e-materials or e-resources registered on your university database. If your university repository has cached the paywalled or subscription-based articles, you can quickly get access for free with your university ID. Here are the steps to follow:

Step 1: Open Scholar Homepage >> Go to Menu >> Jump over to "Google Scholar Settings."

Step 2: Click on the "Library Links" option >> Next to the library links enter your University name >> Check the box next to your university name. Don't forget to check the Open WorldCat box to access all the papers listed in your database.

Step 3: Click save

Step 4: Go back to the search bar >> Type any topic or article >> Shows the results.

Step 5: On the right-hand side of the result, you will find a link to the paper that is accessible from your university library (This is not the case for all the articles, for a few, you might not get any link mentioned, but you could use the ">> (more)" option to find it or access it)

Step 6: You will be redirected to your university library database upon clicking the link. Login using the credentials and find the paper!

More or less, the linking procedure remains the same for most university records. However, even after multiple attempts, if you did not get the article, you can request the article from your University; they will help you find or get it from another source!

Remember, linking your University to this database will not provide access to all the e-resources. For subject-specific or complex and in-depth paper discovery, you must explore subject-specific or individual subject databases at your University.

Few quick examples:

The Catholic University of America

The University of Texas at San Antonio

How to connect Google Scholar to the Walden Library

How to find articles on Google Scholar?

We all know that Google Scholar links most research papers to commercial journals or publishers. Once you have accessed the platform via Google Scholar login and when you search for an article on the query bar, the search results there would consist of only the abstract of the paper and citation information with a link redirecting to its publisher. Thus, the search results would predominantly include paywalled papers.

If you are accessing it from your University, here is how you find the research paper:

On-Campus: It's easier to search google scholar than ever; Login to your university, connect google scholar repository, open the link https://scholar.google.com and start searching! You will find the desired or interesting papers.

Off-Campus: First, you must link your University to the Google Scholar account. Then, use google scholar, to connect google scholar to your university VPN and start surfing for the paper that you have been looking for.

If you are interested in accessing it as an individual author without any affiliation to the University, here is how you find it:

Step 1: Search for any keyword or phrase or topic on the search bar; it's a good practice to use quote marks for the searches for faster discovery.

Step 2: You could find the article in the first SERP if the article is available on the database.

Step 3: Click on the article title; it will take you to the publisher's site. You could access the article based on its accessibility (free or paid).

Step 4: You can use the link, refer to it, and cite it if it's free. If it's paid, you can use the link to buy or pay for the access.

How to cite a reference using Google Scholar?

Google Scholar provides a hassle-free feature to cite a reference in different citation formats and styles quickly. You can mention the paper you have been eyeing by using the option "Cite" right beneath the article description. Sometimes, you will get it by clicking on the "more" option.

Click on the "cite" feature; you will get a dialogue box with different citation styles, including APA, MLA , Chicago, Harvard, and Vancouver. You can copy and paste them on paper or export them in various formats.

How to export the citations to the citation manager?

Google Scholar search provides you with various citation export formats, including BibTeX, EndNote, RefMan, RefWorks, Zotero, Mendeley, and more.

Its default bibliography manager is set to BibTeX. You can change the settings to export references to the desired format.

Follow the steps to change the settings:>> Go to Menu>> Click on Settings (gear icon) >> Bibliography Manager >> Choose the option "Show links to import citation links into">> Pick the reference management app you want from the drop-down menu. BibTeX would be set as the default one.

Now, you can find the “import link” activated, and the moment you click on the desired format, it gets downloaded, and you can save it appropriately.

Also read: Things To Keep in Mind While Citing

How to export in different formats?

What are the limitations and criticisms of google scholar.

Among numerous academic search engines, Google Scholar is often regarded as one of the largest bibliographic databases that have swiftly transformed the era of basic or fundamental data access to scientific data access.

It is no joke that the database has gained popularity and created a buzz around the scholarly communication world since its onset (2004). Of course, it adheres to a guarded algorithm to show the research articles and is equipped with a series of updates on the platform. Still, tailgating the competitor's or other academic databases and accommodating the latter using Google Scholar and advanced search features has become a blocker lately and affecting its credibility and reputation.

The valuable updates and more user-friendly platform of competitor's site have set a high bar for Google, which is challenging to cross the pathway.

So, what are the limiting factors of it?

1. Criteria for assessing or evaluating the sources? It is essential to consider multiple evaluation factors while assessing any novel research paper before indexing. But, there is no technical information about the criteria or approach used to include the scholarly source in the database. Thus, the quality of the paper remains obscure to the audience.

Google scholar is regarded as the world's comprehensive bibliography database; reflecting all the "scholarly" sources without evaluation and assessment is inappropriate. Ideally, it does include all the scholarly SERP pages ranging from high-quality publications to mediocre content concealed within.

2. Ranking algorithm distortion It looks biased and impartial if we speak about the ranking or the indexing algorithm of Scholar. The results it yields are highly dependent on the citation counts, so the first SERP results would include the papers with more citations, and the reader would likely proceed with the paper and ignore the papers with the least counts. As a result, it will affect many novel research papers that might go unnoticed in the database because of low citation counts. Thus, it affects the visibility and accreditation of both budding authors and their articles.

3. In need of more filtering options

Scholar has a huge database of 389 Million papers, but it lacks the filtering options that other search engines like SciSpace (Formerly Typeset) provide. Finding a relevant article among 300M+ documents with minimal filtering options is not worthwhile.

It lacks the following features:

• Direct search options via papers, Authors, Conferences, Institutions, topics, etc.
• Lack of options to select a PDF or open access (which SciSpace has and that deliberately takes the searchers to their desired set of papers for free and you don't have to pay for most of the papers)
• Lacks the "Sort by" all criteria option (with SciSpace, anybody can find the article based on the citation counts, newest, oldest, or even in alphabetical order)
• Filtering out the desired data based on the type, author, institution, and year.
• The option for quick link sharing on social media platforms (which SciSpace exhibits)

4. Free Access to the papers? Or only to the abstracts? The highly critiqued question these days! Though Google Scholar has made its mark with an emblem and title of "finding infinite research papers," the question here is, "Are the articles available on the database completely free," or how do we even access them for free? No! The search engine is only responsible for searching and giving you the research papers based on the keywords. So, the results would include both freely accessible and paywalled articles.

Most of the content on the platform is from commercial journals or publishers' worlds, allowing us to access only the abstract and not the entire article. But, this is not the case with SciSpace. In SciSpace discover, you will find most of the freely available papers in PDFs, and you can access them and cite them for free. 5. Prone to Cyber sleuths, spam, and gaming! The authentication process needs to be even more stringent in Scholar. People are creating fake profiles, adding fake papers or duplicate papers on their profiles, and gaining counterfeit citations.

According to the study conducted by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, the documents created on SCIgen are getting indexed by Google Scholar, providing more citation counts and quantifying the researcher's h-index and impact factors with a good score, which is against the ethics and a question of the platform's reliability? Thereby manipulating the h-index and impact factors.

6. Lack of dynamic citation graphs view

The static portrayal of academic search engines is faded now. Lately, the ocean of scholarly publications has been flooded with numerous papers. Presenting them in 3D or visual citation formats with graphs or citation information would be fruitful for the readers and help them easily squeeze in the required information. One such example is connected graphs, which allow you to create a graph or map of your shortlisted papers required for the literature review and help you compare, analyze, and get the required information from them quicker and faster. Though the feature has great benefits, currently most databases lack it including Google Scholar.

7. Amass of information clutter

When you conduct any Google Scholar search, you will sometimes find fragmentary, hodgepodge, and even duplicated results. The output might also include different versions of the published article or preprints, so the decluttering and heuristic nourishment are still lacking on the platform.

8. Includes predatory journals

Google Scholar makes an effort to index as many publications as it can. As a part, it is also enclosing predatory journals contributing to the contamination of authentic scientific and academic resources too. There should be some approach or use of NLP to avoid this.

9. Erroneous search results

Google Scholar has trouble identifying works on the other sites precisely; thus, the output includes scattered and zombie information from many disciplines, causing inaccurate additional results. The mixed case and the interpunctuation characters in the article titles confuse the results, and the authors are given the wrong papers. Sometimes, a few sloppy outputs are presented without apparent justification. The best example would be indexing the arXiV preprint site.

10. Lacks mapping to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

The basic user interface and lack of Google Scholar advanced search features on Google Scholar fail to provide the information relevant to clinical practice or medicine as MEDLINE offers. Ideally, the database would be of little or no use to clinicians. Instead, clinicians are using SciSpace to get relevant pieces of information on medical library associations, clinical practice, and more.

11. No systematic and timely content feeding

Google Scholar doesn't crawl scholarly content regularly like SciSpace and Scopus databases. It falls behind in indexing the articles and keeping the database up to date. It is almost a full year behind in indexing PubMed entries. So, we cannot rely on this database to retrieve clinical practice data or records.

12. Lack of claim-level analysis

Those who have explored Scite.ai might have understood the preface of claim-level analysis. Google Scholar emphasizes the citation-based algorithm to produce the results. But, when you are performing a literature review, the citation-level study doesn't serve the purpose of providing relevant articles as the paper could or could not have supported the claim of your topic of interest.

To dodge this, Scite.ai has implemented the new NLP algorithm or tools that support the retrieval process) to sort the results based on supporting or contrasting claims. It helps the users to include or select relevant publications. However, this NLP search button doesn't work the same or yield accurate results for all the cases, and the effectiveness is still being investigated. But, users are in favor of using this claim-level analysis approach.

Likewise, myriad other limiting factors must be addressed to stand on top among competitors like SciSpace, Scopus, Web of Science, and more. Hence, the users are requesting the Google Scholar advanced search features and pitching the support team about the discrepancies and ambiguities happening on the platform.

Although it is a limited tool and not as comprehensive as it claims to be, the Google Scholar database is a decent tool that delivers results quicker and faster. You will have to wait for what it has in store for you in the future!

What is the future of Google Scholar Database?

The advantage of being an exhaustive database is itself a disadvantage here. Because a single query would fetch thousands of articles that might or might not be relevant, factoring out the irrelevant papers is another ball game. So, the database needs to work on the serendipity process to minimize scanning thousands of irrelevant or other documents by implementing recommended engines.

In the present scenario, other databases like Web of Science and Scopus essentially play with NLP and API for automatic data retrieval of papers and profiles. Google Scholar database should level up the retrieval game by integrating an AI-based or API interface to act smarter and stay connected with the reader's demands.

The research discovery should be made simpler and user-friendly by showing the full-length scientific data directly rather than sharing only the abstracts of the paper. On the flip side, it would be difficult for the Google Scholar team as they work more with commercial publishers and can only lead users to the abstract, not the full text (for paywalled articles). Again, this needs to be sorted out.

As of now, it is merely a basic search engine that crawls all the academic content published on the web. Sometimes, it even crawls the latest version of the existing article as a new paper and indexes it to the database, which could impact the author's credibility and citation counts. So, users are in quest of a better Google Scholar database that encompasses all the above-discussed pointers.

Technically, the infrastructure must be standardized to align with the researcher's needs. The updates should promote scientific discovery and support the user's novel idea.

Overall, the quality of the content, ambiguities, lack of transparency, and disingenuous results need to be evaded on the platform.

The Best Alternatives to Google Scholar

Web of Science, Scopus, and SciSpace are the best alternatives to search Google Scholar. All three databases include millions of research papers and advanced filtering options, which help you choose desired research paper in less than seconds. But, Web of Science and Scopus only help you find the research articles and are paid platforms, whereas SciSpace is the largest indexing database that caters to academicians' needs (you can access it for free).

SciSpace is the only integrated research platform where academicians can discover, write (effortless writing and auto-formatting), publish, and disseminate their research papers."Trace the paper" is the most crucial feature of SciSpace embraced by the research realm. The feature aids the research discovery process by keeping all the related papers visually on par. Yes, it keeps your literature review woes at bay by providing a hassle-free or click-click method to access all the relevant papers on a single page. With this feature, you can explore the related papers, citations, references, author details, contributing institutions, and related topics in no time.Another significant feature of SciSpace is Copilot. It’s an AI research assistant that simplifies reading research papers and helps researchers gain an in-depth understanding of the papers.

Let’s say you are reading a research paper and need to decode any complex/technical section of the research paper. What do you do? You go through the paper multiple times, try to refer to other papers, try to search for their meaning, and whatnot? Despite all these, getting the proper context of the section is still tricky and time-consuming. But with the help of Copilot, you can just highlight any text/section, image, table, or figure, and get the explanations. You can even snip mathematical equations and understand them in easier terms. You can even change the language and get the descriptions in a language that you would like to read a paper. You can explore Copilot on any of your papers either by searching for a paper on SciSpace directly or by uploading a PDF. You can try SciSpace Copilot and read any paper of your choice.

So yeah, SciSpace is not merely a search engine, it’s an end-to-end comprehensive platform. It helps researchers right from research discovery to reading and understanding a research paper, to writing a manuscript and submitting it to a journal.

Academicians have acknowledged our database and incorporated SciSpace research papers into their universities worldwide, including the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Nanyang Technological University, Kent University, and more. If you've come here in search of an academic search engine to find a research paper, head over to SciSpace Discover and access any paper.

Frequently Asked Questions about Google Scholar

1. are google scholar citations accurate.

Google Scholar citations are prone to manipulation and inaccurate as it indexes all the academic content on the web regardless of version history, duplicates, name ambiguities, and more. Anything cited by the research paper, be it a blog or an excerpt, would be considered a gained citation.

2. Are google scholar articles credible?

The lack of transparency or the non-disclosure of its indexing algorithm on how the content is included in the database makes it less ideal for literature reviews and systematic reviews.

3. Is google scholar reliable?

There is no proper validation of sources on Scholar, so its reliability is still being questioned.

4. Is google scholar free to use?

Yes! The platform is free to use. You can search and discover research papers on the search engine. However, if the article is paywalled or subscription-based, you might have to follow their publishers' policy to access the research paper.

5. Is google scholar social networking?

It is not a social networking site; you can only find or discover publications on the site. But yes, you can create your academic profile on the platform and add any of your co-authors but interacting with other users is not attainable.

6. Can google scholar find conference proceedings?

You can surely find conference proceedings and conference papers. If you want to search within a particular conference, you will have to hover over the Google Scholar advanced search features and then search for them.

7. What do I do if I can't access google scholar?

The access errors can be for various reasons. Depending on the error, you can reach out to their support team.

8. How often does Google Scholar get updated?

For new papers, it gets updated regularly (day or weekly basis). For existing papers, it takes a minimum of 6-8 months to update the paper.

9. How to find research articles on google scholar?

Go to the website, input the desired paper and click on search. If the database has indexed the article, you will get it on top of the page. Else, you can discover it on SciSpace seamlessly.

10. Why is google scholar not showing my paper?

It depends on multiple factors, including accessibility (should be hosted on academic pages), publication period (it might take weeks or months to get indexed), transparency (the abstract or full-text should be made available to the users), formats (should be available in .PDF format) or size (shouldn't exceed more than 5 MB)

11. Why is google scholar not updating citations?

It takes several months to update the Google Scholar citations. So, you need to wait for it to get reflected. Also, the citation counts will not reflect if the article that has cited your paper is not indexed on this academic database.

12. Can we rely on Google scholar for grey literature?

You can refer to some of the top results, but it shouldn't be the go-to or only source for grey literature.

13. Are google scholar articles peer-reviewed?

The articles are not entirely peer-reviewed; it also indexes preprints, grey literature, and other scholarly materials that are not peer-reviewed.

14. How do I use Google Scholar for legal research?

You can click on the Case Law button on the home page and find the required information on legal research. However, the information accuracy is not assured by Google.

15. How can I access google scholar without institutional email?

You can easily access and search for any research paper without any email address or account. You will need an institutional email only if you want to indicate a verified status on your scholar profile.

16. Can I create a google scholar account without Gmail?

You cannot create an account without Gmail, but you can explore the platform and discover any research papers without creating an account.

17. How does the google scholar alert work?

Once you have set up the alert query, email, and the number of search results on the "create alert" feature, you will be notified via email of your alert preferences.

18. What is google scholar case law?

Google Scholar case law provides access to judicial branch laws or common law based on written opinions by appellate courts.

19. Does google scholar show the journals list?

There is no clear picture of the journals listed on the search engine. But, it shows the list of top publications under the feature "Metrics".

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Abstract: In this work, we discuss building performant Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In particular, we study the importance of various architecture components and data choices. Through careful and comprehensive ablations of the image encoder, the vision language connector, and various pre-training data choices, we identified several crucial design lessons. For example, we demonstrate that for large-scale multimodal pre-training using a careful mix of image-caption, interleaved image-text, and text-only data is crucial for achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) few-shot results across multiple benchmarks, compared to other published pre-training results. Further, we show that the image encoder together with image resolution and the image token count has substantial impact, while the vision-language connector design is of comparatively negligible importance. By scaling up the presented recipe, we build MM1, a family of multimodal models up to 30B parameters, including both dense models and mixture-of-experts (MoE) variants, that are SOTA in pre-training metrics and achieve competitive performance after supervised fine-tuning on a range of established multimodal benchmarks. Thanks to large-scale pre-training, MM1 enjoys appealing properties such as enhanced in-context learning, and multi-image reasoning, enabling few-shot chain-of-thought prompting.

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The problem with making all academic research free

A new funding model for journals could deprive the world of valuable research in the humanities and social sciences..

There has been an earthquake in my corner of academia that will affect who teaches in prestigious universities and what ideas circulate among educated people around the world.

And it all happened because a concept rooted in good intentions — that academic research should be “open access,” free for everyone to read — has started to go too far.

The premise of open-access publishing is simple and attractive. It can cost libraries thousands of dollars a year to subscribe to academic journals, which sometimes means only academics affiliated with wealthy colleges and universities may access that research. But under open-access publishing, nearly anyone with an internet connection can find and read those articles for free. Authors win, because they find more readers. Academics around the world benefit, because they can access the latest scholarship. And the world wins, because scientific and intellectual progress is facilitated by the free exchange of ideas.

By now this model has taken hold in the natural sciences, especially in biology and biomedicine; during the pandemic many publishers removed paywalls from articles about vaccines and treatments. The Biden administration requires federally funded scholarly publications to be made freely available without any delay.

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However, there is no such thing as a free academic article. Even with digital distribution, the expenses of running a journal are considerable. These costs include hosting the websites where people submit, peer-review, and edit articles; copyediting; advertising; preserving journal archives; and maintaining continuity as editors come and go.

As a result, unless journals have a source of revenue other than subscription fees, any move toward open access raises the question of who will cover the costs of publication.

One answer is that the money will come from authors themselves or their academic institutions or other backers. This works well enough in the natural sciences, because those researchers are often funded by grants, and some of that money can be set aside to cover a journal’s fees for publishing scientific articles. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation demands that all research funded by the foundation, including the underlying data, be published open access.

According to a paper published in Quantitative Science Studies , however, only a small fraction of scholars in the humanities publish their articles on an open-access basis. Unlike biologists and biomedical engineers, humanities scholars such as philosophers and historians do not get grants that can cover the publishing costs.

This means that if open access is to take hold in those fields as well — as many publishers and academics are advocating — the costs will have to be covered by some foundation or other sponsor, by the scholars’ institutions, or even by the scholars themselves. And all these models have serious downsides.

I’m a political philosopher. The earthquake in my field that I mentioned earlier shook one of our most prominent journals: the Journal of Political Philosophy.

Publishing an article in this journal has long made the difference between whether a candidate gets hired, tenured, or promoted at an elite institution of higher education. The high quality has stemmed in large part from the rigorous approach of the founding editor, Robert Goodin.

At the end of 2023, the publisher, Wiley, terminated its contract with Goodin. The reasons were not immediately clear, and over 1,000 academics, including me, signed a petition stating that we would not serve on the editorial board or write or review for the journal until Wiley reinstates Goodin. I recently attended a panel at an American Philosophical Association conference where philosophers voiced their anger and puzzlement about the situation.

One source of the problem appears to be that Wiley now charges the authors of an article or their institutions $3,840 to get published open access in the journal.

The Journal of Political Philosophy is actually hybrid open access, which means it waives the article processing charges for authors who permit their work to appear behind a subscription-only paywall. Nonetheless, Goodin and Anna Stilz , a Princeton professor and Journal of Political Philosophy editorial board member, point out that publishers like Wiley now have a strong incentive to favor open-access articles.

In the old model, in which university libraries subscribed to journals, editors were mainly incentivized to publish first-rate material that would increase subscriptions. In the open-access model, however, now that authors or their universities must cover the costs of processing articles, publishers of humanities journals seem to be incentivized to boost revenue by accepting as many articles as possible. According to Goodin , open access has “been the death knell of quality academic publishing.” The reason that Goodin lost his job, Goodin and Stilz imply, is that Wiley pressured Goodin to accept more articles to increase Wiley’s profits, and he said no. (Wiley representatives say that lines of communication had collapsed with Goodin.)

Early this year, Goodin cofounded a new journal titled simply Political Philosophy . The journal will be published by the Open Library of Humanities, which is subsidized by libraries and institutions around the world. But this version of open-access publishing does not have the financial stability of the old subscription model. Scholars affiliated with the Open Library of Humanities have pointed out that the project has substantial overhead costs, and it relied on a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that has already ended. The Open Library of Humanities is an experiment, and I hope that it works, but as of now it publishes only 30 journals , compared with the 1,600 journals that Wiley publishes.

The fact remains that no one has satisfactorily explained how open access could work in the humanities and social sciences.

In his 2023 book “ Athena Unbound : Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All,” UCLA history professor Peter Baldwin attempts an answer. He points to Latin America, where some national governments cover all expenses of academic publishing. But this proposal ignores the fact that the governments of the United States and other nations probably do not want to pay for humanities and social sciences journals.

Baldwin also floats the idea of preprint depositories where academics could share documents on the cloud before they have undergone the (somewhat expensive) process of peer review. But this means that academics would lose the benefits that come from getting double-blind feedback from one’s peers. This idea would reduce the costs of publishing a journal article, but it would turn much academic writing into fancy blogging.

Ultimately, Baldwin’s solution is that authors might “have to participate directly, giving them skin in the game and helping contain costs.” This means academics might ask their employers to pay the article processing charges, ask a journal for the processing fees to be waived, or dig into their own pockets to pay to publish.

And it might mean less gets published overall. The journal Government and Opposition, published by Cambridge University Press, is entirely open access and charges $3,450 for an article to be published. I’d have to apply for a discount or a waiver to publish there. Or I could do what political philosophers in Japan and Bosnia and Herzegovina have told me they do: avoid submitting to open-access journals. Their universities will not cover their article processing charges except maybe in the top journals, and even the reduced fees can run into hundreds of dollars that these professors do not have.

In “Athena Unbound,” Baldwin notes that Harvard subscribes to 10 times as many periodicals as India’s Institute of Science. One can bemoan this fact, but one may also appreciate that Harvard’s largesse spreads enough subscription revenue around to reputable journals to enable academics to avoid paying to publish in them, no matter whether they teach at regional state schools, non-elite private schools, or institutions of higher education in poor countries. For all its flaws, the old model meant that when rich alumni donated to their alma maters, it increased library budgets and thereby made it possible for scholars of poetry and state politics to run and publish in academic journals.

Until we have more evidence that open-access journals in the humanities and social sciences can thrive in the long run, academics need to appreciate the advantages of the subscription model.

This article was updated on March 28 to correct the reference to the paper published in Quantitative Science Studies.

Nicholas Tampio is a professor of political science at Fordham University in New York City.

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