Tips for Using Google Scholar

Does Google Scholar cover all the scholarly literature?

Pros

Google Scholar does include a very large amount of the scholarly literature.

In addition to scholarly journals it also includes things like preprints, conference proceedings, and other documents (these are usually called gray literature and many databases don’t include information about them).

Cons

Consider the whole universe of scholarly literature. Specialized databases usually cover a specific section, e.g., the Agricola database covers agriculture and related fields.

Google Scholar only covers part of this scholarly universe but doesn’t tell us what’s included and what’s not included.

People who have done research on Google Scholar have found that it generally covers science and technology well, but does not cover social sciences and humanities as well. Also, Google Scholar does a better job finding online materials than those only published in print.

How to Make it Better

Google Scholar can be a quick and easy way to get your research started. You will also want to use other specialized databases, especially if you are:

1. Searching in the social sciences and the humanities and it is important that you do a quality job of covering the literature on your topic.
2. Doing any kind of literature review, in particular for a thesis or dissertation. You will want to use the relevant library databases. See the lists of databases.
3. Check out the 300+ specialized databases the library has paid for!

More Tips

Google Scholar is fast and easy to use

Google Scholar finds large sets of scholarly articles

Using Google Scholar with NCSU Libraries