Explanation of Google Scholar's uses, limitations, and search tips.

Google Scholar: uses and limitations

Google Scholar is a search engine for scholarly literature, widely used by researchers and students. It’s especially useful for searching publications when you already know their title or for doing a quick search on a specific topic.

Google Scholar is not suited for discovery purposes, i.e.,  to get a comprehensive overview of scientific literature on a certain topic, e.g. for your thesis or literature review. This is because:

• Google Scholar offers limited options to build search queries and combine multiple search terms with Boolean operators (like AND, OR, NOT).
• By default, Google Scholar searches in the full text of publications. Advanced searching allows you to limit your search to specific fields (title, author, a particular journal and date), but you can’t limit your search to, e.g. title, abstract and keywords fields only (as in Scopus).
• Not everything in Google Scholar is "scholarly. The way Google Scholar selects ‘scholarly’ literature and its database coverage are not transparent.
• Google Scholar ranks the search results and shows only the first 1,000 results of any search, based on algorithms that are unknown and change frequently. The ranking depends on settings that you may be unaware of, such as your language settings or location. This means that the results will differ each time you search with the same query.

To discover new literature or get an overview of scientific literature on a certain topic, therefore, it’s better to use a bibliographic database such as Scopus.

Getting access to publications

You can use the link to Google Scholar at the WUR Library website. You automatically get access to the sources that are part of the WUR collections if you are on campus.

When you work from the Google Scholar website, make sure that it makes a link to WUR Library to give you access to the licensed sources. If you don’t see a ‘Get It from WUR’ link next to your search results, go to Settings in the menu at the top of the page. Here, choose Library links and add Wageningen University & Research Library to the list.

Go to Off-campus access to the online Library resources for more information.

Tips to improve your search results

• Use the Advanced search option (in the menu) to search in specific ‘fields’ or to limit results by year range. These options won’t work optimally (see above), but they can help to limit the number of results.

• Use double quotation marks to search for multiple words next to each other in the specified order (like in compound terms or an exact phrase), e.g., “climate change” or “the impact of climate change on food security”. Otherwise, Google (Scholar) automatically combines multiple words with the operator AND.

• Include alternative terms by using the OR operator. In some cases, Google Scholar doesn’t include obvious synonyms in your search. With the OR operator, you can combine these terms and find more. Instead of OR, you can also use | (a pipe), e.g., “heart|myocardial infarction|attack” finds heart infarction, myocardial infarction, heart attack and myocardial attack.

• Exclude specific terms by using the – operator. You can exclude as many terms as you want, e.g., mercury –ford –freddy –outboards –planet.

• Allintitle: Limit your search to terms appearing in the title only, e.g., allintitle:”agaricus bisporus”.

• Filetype: Limit your search to specific file types by using filetype: or ext: E.g., “agaricus bisporus” filetype:pdf

• Site: Limit your search to certain websites or domains. This can be useful for websites without good search options, e.g., “plant diseases” site:journals.plos.org. By searching within certain domain extensions, you can limit your search by country or type of institution, e.g., “plant diseases” site:.edu (academic institutions in the USA).

• Combine all of the above to do more precise searches, e.g., allintitle:“carbon dioxide” OR CO2 -phosphorus ext:pdf site:.edu

• Personalise your searching via Settings and use other handy features of Google Scholar*:
  • Make your own library of references (called My Library)
  • Create literature alerts
  • Import citation links to EndNote or another reference manager.
         1. Log in with your Gmail account
         2. Save your articles in your My Library
         3. Import all citations in your My Library at once to EndNote
    *To use these options, you’ll need to sign in with your Google account.

Google also offers specialised search engines for specific source types, such as Google Books and Google Patents.

For more tips and information, go to About Google Scholar.

Questions and support  

Do you have questions about this service, or would you like personal support? Feel free to contact us. You can send an email to servicedesk.facilities@wur.nl.