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Google Scholar (GS) is a freely-accessible web search engine that indexes the full-text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the GS index includes most peer-reviewed online journals, except for those published by Elsevier, the world's largest scientific publisher. It is similar in function to the freely available Scirus from Elsevier, and to CiteSeer, a freely available resource. It is also similar to the subscription-based tools, Elsevier's Scopus and Thomson ISI's Web of Science. GS nonetheless claims to cover more websites, journal sources and languages. Its advertising slogan - "Stand on the shoulders of giants" - is a nod to scientists who have contributed to the scholarly literature over the centuries. In terms of features, GS allows users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether they be online or in libraries (see *).) Using its "group of" feature, it shows the various available links to the journal article. If the article is available freely on the web, those links will be shown, but otherwise it provides only links to the subscription-based sites (At least, that's what is was doing in September 2006. In some earlier versions, its "Group of" feature sometimes also provided a link to free full text versions of articles.) Access to non-subscription versions is now provided by a link to Google, where one can find such open access articles. Through its "Cited by" feature, GS provides access to citations of articles that have cited the article being viewed (see *). It is this feature in particular that provides the citation indexing previously only found in Scopus and Web of Science. Through its "Related articles" feature, GS presents a list of closely related articles, ranked primarily by how similar these articles are to the original result, but also taking into account the relevance of each paper *. Like other bibliographic databases, it now has importing citation feature was released using bibliography managers*. Similar features are also part of other search engines, such as CiteSeer or Scirus, and will presumably be part of the final version of Microsoft's Windows Live Academic Search. Some searchers consider GS of comparable quality and utility to commercial databases (e.g. *), even though its user-interface (UI) is still in beta. It is recognized that its "cited in" feature in particular poses serious competition to Scopus and Web of Knowledge. Many search experts suggest that its functionality is severely hampered by poor database design. For example, when searching articles based on publication dates, GS results, like Google results, are unreliable, even inaccurate. The number of articles found in some searches, for example, increases when limiting to a range of years (i.e. 2000-2006) instead of decreases. Some librarian critics have said that GS's counterintuitive and illogical presentation of results hinders its usefulness in academia. A significant problem with GS is the secrecy about its coverage, the policy of some publishers that do not allow it to crawl their journals (as of October 2006 the absent notably includes Elsevier), its refusal to publish a list of scientific journals crawled, and its updating policies. It is therefore impossible to know how current and/or exhaustive searches are in GS. Nonetheless, it allows easy access to published articles without the difficulties that are encountered in some commercial databases. For more information about using Google Scholar for literature reviews in scholarly writing, see some of the references below.
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