Why is Google Scholar better than Google for finding research papers?

One advantage of using Google Scholar is that the interface is comforting and familiar to anyone who uses Google. This lowers the learning curve of finding scholarly information.

There are a number of useful differences from a regular Google search. Google Scholar allows you to:

• copy a formatted citation in different styles including MLA and APA
• export bibliographic data (BibTeX, RIS) to use with reference management software
• explore other works have cited the listed work
• easily find full text versions of the article

Although it is free to search in Google Scholar, most of the content is not freely available. Google does its best to find copies of restricted articles in public repositories. If you are at an academic or research institution, you can also set up a library connection that allows you to see items that are available through your institution.

The Google Scholar search results page

The Google Scholar results page differs from the Google results page in a few key ways. The search result page is, however, different and it is worth being familiar with the different pieces of information that are shown. Let’s have a look at the results for the search term “machine learning.”

The first two lines: core bibliographic information

1. The first line of each result provides the title of the document (e.g. of an article, book, chapter, or report).
2. The second line provides the bibliographic information about the document, in order: the author(s), the journal or book it appears in, the year of publication, and the publisher.

Clicking on the title link will bring you to the publisher’s page where you may be able to access more information about the document. This includes the abstract and options to download the PDF.

Quick full text-access options

To the far right of the entry are more direct options for obtaining the full text of the document. In this example, Google has also located a publicly available PDF of the document hosted at umich.edu. Note, that it’s not guaranteed that it is the version of the article that was finally published in the journal.

“Cited by” count and other useful links

Below the text snippet/abstract you can find a number of useful links.

Pro tip: Use a reference manager like Paperpile to keep track of all your sources. Paperpile integrates with Google Scholar and many popular academic research engines and databases, so you can save references and PDFs directly to your library using the Paperpile buttons and later cite them in thousands of citation styles:

Tips for searching Google Scholar

Although Google Scholar limits each search to a maximum of 1,000 results, it’s still too much to explore, and you need an effective way of locating the relevant articles. Here’s a list of pro tips that will help you save time and search more effectively.

1. Google Scholar searches are not case sensitive

You don’t need to worry about case sensitivity when you’re using Google scholar. In other words, a search for “Machine Learning” will produce the same results as a search for “machine learning.”

2. Use keywords instead of full sentences

Let’s say your research topic is about self driving cars. For a regular Google search we might enter something like “what is the current state of the technology used for self driving cars“. In Google Scholar, you will see less than ideal results for this query.

The trick is to build a list of keywords and perform searches for them like self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles, or driverless cars. Google Scholar will assist you on that: if you start typing in the search field you will see related queries suggested by Scholar!

3. Use quotes to search for an exact match

If you put your search phrase into quotes you can search for exact matches of that phrase in the title and the body text of the document. Without quotes, Google Scholar will treat each word separately.

This means that if you search national parks, the words will not necessarily appear together. Grouped words and exact phrases should be enclosed in quotation marks.

3. Add the year to the search phrase to get articles published in a particular year

A search using “self-driving cars 2015,” for example, will return articles or books published in 2015.

4. Use the side bar controls to adjust your search result

Using the options in the left hand panel you can further restrict the search results by limiting the years covered by the search, the inclusion or exclude of patents, and you can sort the results by relevance or by date.

5. Use Boolean operator to better control your searches

Searches are not case sensitive, however, there are a number of Boolean operators you can use to control the search and these must be capitalized.

• AND requires both of the words or phrases on either side to be somewhere in the record.
• NOT can be placed in front of a word or phrases to exclude results which include them.
• OR will give equal weight to results which match just one of the words or phrases on either side.

➡️ Read more about how to efficiently search online databases for academic research.

In case you got overwhelmed by the above options, here’s some illustrative examples:

Google scholar advanced search interface