Enhance Academic Efficiency with Google Scholars: Key Features and Drawbacks

Academic research work as well as academic writing can be significantly exhausting if one does not have command over advanced technology tools that can assist you in improving your work efficiency. No, I am not talking about AI empowered writing tools that write content for you. Well why? It is because if AI is doing all the research and writing content for your academics? Then what are you reading or learning? Nothing! Therefore, I strongly suggest that you use technology as your slave and you remain in authority when making decisions.

Well, whether you are a student or professor or a market researcher or a book author, you will always need to research content to stay updated on latest knowledge and trends in your field. Let us analyse the pros and cons of Google Scholars.

Well, Google Scholars has been one of the most popular research tools for a long time. So what is Google Scholars? It is an academic research engine launched by Google, the search engine giant. Link to access Google Scholars: https://scholar.google.com/.

Features of Google Scholars that I find most useful:

Free and Unlimited access

Variety of disciplines

Search dissertations, research papers, books, abstracts and research articles

Generate reference citations in a variety of formats – APA, Harvard, MLA, Chicago and Vancouver

You can save articles to read later. To view your saved articles, just sign in with your Google account and go to library.

Sort results by time (in years), relevance to keyword, and date.

Sort results by type – review articles

You can even create alert for keywords you are focusing on. Google will alert you whenever a new article is published for that keyword

Drawbacks

You need to verify the link for every result. I have observed that sometimes Google Scholars may point towards a different article link than what is shown.

Generated citations may be incomplete or may have formatting issues. For instance, some times, page numbers may be missing or title may be in CAPS.

You must have an institutional access to read paid articles. Even if you are able to locate the article using Google Scholars, you may still be unable to read it as many publications such as the Lancet are not accessible for free.

Links that lead to books may have limited preview. You may be able to preview a book but you might not be able to read a book for free.

Conclusion

Though Google Scholars works quite efficiently in near 90% of the search queries, users are still cautioned to check citations. Overall, a winning tool for academic research and writing.

Do you have anything to share regarding your experience with Google Scholars? Post your comments!