What is Google Scholar?
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. However, most often you have access to the citation--which you then use within a database search or as an interlibrary loan.
Features of Google Scholar
- Search diverse sources from one convenient place
- Find articles, theses, books, abstracts, or court opinions
- Links to articles that cite the article
- Links to similar articles
- Locate the complete document through your library or on the web
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. Note that more recent documents will have fewer number of CITED by amounts--they haven't been around long enough.