Google Scholar is a search engine that attempts to track all of the world's scholarly and research output. Because of this is maintains better coverage of non English language material than Scopus and Web of Science. Some of the major benefits of this search engine is that it indexes and maintains citation information on the vast majority of articles, conference papers, and presentations that it indexes. In practical terms this means that Google Scholar is the most used, and most widely looked at of all of the various citation databases.
However, Google Scholar does have some limitations which make it less than an ideal source of metrics information. The first problem is that Google Scholar is a search engine, not a database. While it does maintain many aspects of a normal database such as Scopus, it does not have the same curation standards. You will find non peer-reviewed material in Google Scholar which you wouldn't find in Scopus or Web of Science. Second, its metrics tend to be overly generous. Where Scopus is more conservative since it doesn't index everything, Google Scholar can have metrics which are inflated by non peer-reviewed materials.
Need more information or tips on how to search Google Scholar? Click here to see our helpful research guide.
Consultations
Contact the Research Impact Librarian, Kevin Wiggins at kpwiggin@purdue.edu