Google Scholar: Pros and cons

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PROS:
  • Provides citations in APA for each record and exports to EndNote.
  • Provides full text links to articles in journals/databases that user's library subscribes to.
  • Indexes grey literature and open source documents not always found in subscription based academic databases.
  • Not only shows "cited by" for articles in GS but also provides link to citing articles in Web of Science.

CONS
  • Sometimes makes parsing errors, e.g. confuses author name with article title.
  • Indexes material that is not considered scholarly, e.g. PPT presentations.
  • Limited advance search options, e.g. cannot do an author search by affiliation.
  • Cannot refine results by subject headings, document type, affiliation, etc.
  • Cannot click on an author in a record to see what else they have written (the exception is when an author has set up a profile in My Citations).
  • Is not very transparent, e.g. how it defines what it considers “scholarly,” what journals/databases are crawled and what metadata is considered for ranking search results.

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