Google Scholar: a review of literature examining its effectiveness as a search tool
Description
This article reviews the effectiveness of Google Scholar (GS) as a search engine for scholarly content, highlighting its significant limitations. While GS is widely used due to its familiarity, it lacks curation and transparent indexing guidelines, making it unsuitable as a primary resource for systematic reviews. The search results can be dated and biased toward older publications, with citation counts heavily influencing rankings, which can disadvantage new papers. Additionally, GS does not support replicable searches and restricts the number of references that can be retrieved at once. The article emphasizes the need for researchers to be aware of these limitations and recommends using curated databases for more effective literature searches. For further guidance, IFIS has published a guide on best practices for literature searching.4o mini