The whole world goes around smugly saying “look it up on Google Scholar” as if it were the salvation for any assignment at university. And yeah, it’s cool, but nobody warns you about the messes it has.
The first thing is to understand that Google Scholar in Spanish works great if you search for things in humanities or social sciences in our language. For that it’s a beast. But if you get into very technical topics or pure sciences, you might be left wanting because the really good stuff is in English and in other databases that are paid.
The interface is the same as always, the Google one from all life. You type in four words and done. But if you try Google Scholar advanced search it changes your life. You can filter by author, by journal, by date… and that way you don’t get 300,000 results that have nothing to do with what you’re looking for.
The other day a colleague told me he had found all his articles there. Of course, because how to create a Google Scholar profile is free and you can set it up in five minutes. That’s good if you’re a researcher, because people find you and cite you more. But then what happens happens: articles that aren’t yours show up just because you have the same last name as some guy from Chile. A disaster.
The worst by far is the amount of junk you find. People think that because it’s on Google Scholar it’s already pure science, and no. Google Scholar disadvantages has quite a few: there are student papers, unreviewed stuff, and a lot of copy-paste from blogs that sneak in as articles. You have to review everything with a magnifying glass.
The university folks always recommend using academic repositories in Spanish like Dialnet or Redalyc to cross-check. And they’re right. Because what happens with Google is that it mixes apples with oranges. You might get an article from a prestigious journal next to a bachelor’s thesis that slipped in who knows how.
Another issue: PDFs. Many links take you to ResearchGate or Academia.edu, which are like Facebook for researchers. There people upload their stuff, but watch out, because sometimes Google Scholar pdf downloads documents for you that maybe shouldn’t be posted due to copyright. If the author hasn’t asked the publisher for permission, there can be problems later.
What is cool is the citations thing. When you search for something, at the bottom it shows “Cited by” and you see who has used that article. For finding related bibliography it’s the best. You go from one paper to another like in a network and you find things you didn’t even know existed.
My advice: use it without a doubt, it’s the fastest way to start any research. But don’t stop there. If you want to do things right, also search in your library’s databases. Most have full-text access through the university library if you set up the links properly. And that is pure gold, because you access paid stuff without paying a cent.
In the end it’s like everything: a very useful tool if you know how to use it, but dangerous if you believe it blindly.
