Google Scholar: Providing Academic Results
What is Google Scholar? Google Scholar is a search engine that provides academic results to its users, showing links to journal articles or theses on a selected topic. It’s free to access, and scans the text of academic literature available to it in order to provide the most relevant results according to the search terms chosen by the user. It aims to assess every piece of research the way a scholar would do, giving equal weighting to the content of the article, the author, and how many times it has been cited by other works. However, it has been said that it gives disproportionate importance to the citation count, and works that are already heavily cited will appear in the top results, thus accumulating even more citations. This leaves other articles at a disadvantage regardless of the quality of content or reputation of the author. Despite the imperfections of its…
