Education

Limitations of Google Scholar

Google Scholar is an open-access web search engine that indexes the full text and metadata of scholarly literature. It covers a wide range of disciplines and publishing formats. As a result, it can be a valuable resource for research in a variety of fields. It is particularly helpful for researchers who want to find a specific article in a particular discipline.

Relevance of grey literature

Google Scholar and Web of Science can be helpful resources to find research papers, but they are not the end-all-be-all for finding grey literature. When conducting a research paper, you can use a title search to find grey literature, but it is best to conduct full-text searches for the best results. These searches will turn up more ‘other’ grey literature than academic papers, so it’s important to screen the results well beyond the first twenty or thirty pages.

Another way to find grey literature is to find websites with articles, books, or reports by researchers in your field. Some of these websites may be difficult to find, so you need to know which ones are relevant to your research. To make the process easier, you can create a list of relevant search terms and record the sources as you search. Grey literature databases are also helpful, as they contain links to many repositories around the world. One such database is GreySource, which links to grey literature repositories. Another great option is Elsevier’s conference proceedings.

Duplication rates in Google Scholar

The duplication rates reported by Google Scholar and Web of Science reflect the proportion of duplicate articles, according to their respective samples. For example, a paper with two authors published in two different journals has a higher likelihood of being duplicated than a paper with one author. The two databases also include data on the number of citations in each article.

When analyzing Google Scholar duplication rates, researchers looked for patterns of duplication in studies. These patterns included studies that replicated the same outcomes or samples, or articles with similar methods but different outcomes. The authors also identified which journals duplicated the articles, as well as how frequently the articles were cited.

Efficacy of Google Scholar for finding grey literature

When searching for grey literature, Google Scholar is a useful resource. However, it should not be relied on as a standalone source of the information you seek. While Google Scholar yields a large proportion of grey literature, it also fails to identify many relevant articles. Only 61 of the 84 articles I searched were identified using Google Scholar. I could not find any of the remaining 23 articles using the standard systematic review search string. Nevertheless, using Google Scholar is useful if you have a large amount of articles to review but not a complete source of grey literature.

Academic search engines such as Google Scholar are particularly useful when conducting systematic reviews. This is because they are highly efficient in terms of time and resources, and they enable rapid linking to full-text documents and other information. In addition, they are capable of identifying large amounts of grey literature, which is crucial for systematic reviews.

Limitations of Google Scholar

Google Scholar can be a useful resource for systematic reviews, but the limitations of the database are significant. Its metadata is poor and difficult to extract, making it difficult to perform bibliometric analyses. As such, it cannot be relied upon as a substitute for academic citation databases. The following are some of the limitations of Google Scholar that should be taken into consideration before using the service.

The most important limitation of Google Scholar is its lack of context-related searching. Contextual searching is vital in academic research, and it’s one of the most important aspects of academic search engines. To design a proper context-related search function, the designers of Google Scholar must understand the context of academic articles and the relationship between words.

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