Google Scholar
external page Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine for academic documents. Google Scholar indexes full texts and metadata of academic articles, patents and books from all disciplines. To this end, Google Scholar uses web documents in PDF or HTML format that are classified as “academic” based on their structure and URL (see external page Google Scholar inclusion guidelines).
Access
Google Scholar is freely accessible.
Access to full texts is licence-dependent. If full texts of publications are licensed by the ETH Library, students and other members of ETH Zurich can access them only if they are logged onto the ETH Library’s network. If they are outside the ETH Zurich network, they need to have configured VPN.
To display the ETH Library full texts in Google Scholar,
- click on the link external page https://scholar.google.com/scholar_setprefs?instq=ETH-Bibliothek
- then confirm by clicking on “Save”.
Links to online holdings are then displayed in the search hits as ETH Get It. Links to print holdings are displayed with ETH Library @ swisscovery after clicking on the symbol >> (see image below).
Google Scholar versus Scopus or Web of Science
With Google Scholar, the search hits are determined by sophisticated algorithms, which are not published, however. Unfortunately, the sequence of the search hits displayed by Google Scholar, and the number of citations, are particularly easy to manipulate (see external page Wikipedia). By contrast, the methods deployed by the databases Web of Science and Scopus are transparent. As the latter use strict quality criteria, they index fewer documents than Google Scholar. Furthermore, external page Web of Science and Scopus offer advanced search and filter options, which are lacking in Google Scholar.
Google Scholar is, therefore, less transparent than traditional library databases but offers high-quality full-text searches across a particularly large number of documents.
