Academic Google: What is and how does the Scholar search engine work?

Google Scholar bibliography search engine

Definitely, the information that we are going to extract from Academic google (in English, Google Scholar) is worthy of a reminder. Contents and academic bibliography; free books, notes, magazines, scientific journal articles, citations, abstracts … etc. We will not find it anywhere else.

An example; For the search for "architecture" we have access to more than 900,000 Books and articles, most of them in free format.

Not bad at all if we compare it with other portals dedicated tocontent curation or specialized in scientific and academic bibliography.

If already at the time we saw how to find Doctoral Theses for our different projects. Now, we want to show you a tool that, although for some it is unknown, is actually a digital library immense where the free academic information and in many cases, of quality, awaits us for your consultation and download.

An ICT application for both teachers and users that represents a bibliographic and educational search engine, so, let's see … What is google academic for? And how can we search in a simple way.

What is academic Google

It is an instrument or tool based on a seeker bibliographic website of education and culture in all fields. Is he scientific google!

The search engine leaves users Search for studies or texts reviewed by specialists, specialized bibliography, theses, journals, abstracts, books and articles from sources. All the information is extracted from academic publishers, professional societies, libraries, preliminary print repositories or universities.

The Google Scholar library (Denominated in English) searches in different sources from a single platform, finding the quotes, books, the academic documents, scientific summaries and articles in full format through the personal library of each one or in the same network.

As if that were not enough, he is able to achieve information on academic grades that they are "the essence" in a given field of scientific research.

What information does Google Scholar or academic find:

In the following diagram we can perceive what we are going to find in Spanish; Journal article, conference materials, thesis as well as academic papers, books, citations references, an interesting question which are patents and various academic pages …

It should be borne in mind that this platform, unlike the generic search engines or the repositories that we can discover on the Internet. When you start a session, allows you to show that the results are ordered by bibliographic relevance and usefulness.

In addition, we will have educational documents available with support links in the main index; resources such as scientific articles in Spanish and even English, Thesis … etc. Is a virtual campus of knowledge with thousands of PDFs to train and investigate!

How academic Google works

To understand the advantages ofoperation of this bibliographic search engine we add some simple instructions and a video tutorial of this library from the University of Castilla-La Mancha for the expansion of technical information …!

How to search the bibliographic database:

Although it is not necessary to be registered to locate the data on the Google scholarly articlesIt is convenient because that way we can easily save the selected resource in our account and have them as a query in the educational tool.
1.- Simple search tutorial

When we enter from HERE to locate data (Initial Search - Let's remember the name in English Google Scholar by the URL that appears):

First it will throw us a «simple search«, that is, putting any phrase or word in the search box. In particular, we must have a series of considerations unlike the traditional locator:

  1. Common characters such as prepositions are omitted as an example; the, the, and, of, … etc. Even some common words.
  2. When we add a word or phrase in the search, it does not take into account the order in which they are words.
  3. It is not case sensitive.
  4. It does not distinguish accents, accents.
2.- Advanced searches tutorial
In the following image we proceed to begin to investigate in a more decisive and exact way with the «Advanced search«. The configuration would be the following in the google academi.

We can rummage by default, remembering that Google Chrome the country where we are and the results will be according to relevance and references or in advanced search where we can identify more characteristics. Two tricks … We can use the operator "Author:" to research a specific author (Ahem: … author: Author name) or title of any document in quotes: "History of the China Sea."

On the right side of the Search Engine We find other tabs of interest that provide us with options in the investigation:

3.- Configuration section

We can identify the search language of the educational google, the number of results or according to the number of citations.

4.- Statistics Section

It shows us results by categorization and relevance within the platform itself.

5.- Alerts Section

The Google academic alerts It is a great tool in which we can configure with an Email to be able to be updated about the topics, news, and authors that interest us.

6.- My appointments section

Track citations on your posts. Appears in search results for Google Academic when searching for an author's name.

7.- My library section

It is used to save the documents that we have found in a search of interest as well as those documents in which we are the author.

We leave you the video to clarify concepts when browsing:

Many researchers and students find in the google scholar material for your projects and studies. The portal indexes libraries, publishers, bibliographic databases, repositories, links to books, scientific journals, conference papers, dissertations, scientific-technical reports … etc. It is a great scholar and online dictionary of knowledge!

Google search exampleAcademic

In the following image we can identify an example of Google Scholar search:

As we see in the bibliographic database, we have complete books in PDF and ordered by date, year or if it is included in any patent or scientific quote.

How to upload a document to Google academic

For add a book or article to the google chrome portalFirst, we have to create an account with our "Google+" profile and add "scientific user" data. But better let's see a tutorial of how to create a researcher profile in Google Acedamic

Then, we have to take some considerations into account so that our documents can be recognized in the library:

  • Articles must be in PDF or HTML format.
  • PDF files must be made with text that can be understood by robots. That is, from the Adobe Acrobat Reader search engine (the usual pdf reader), you must be able to search and locate words.
  • If you upload PDF files that are only images and require OCR to convert to text, they can only be uploaded to Google books (Enter from Here), but Google Scholar does not see them.
  • The information must be located on a university website or some recognized page that collects academic articles.
  • The ideal thing is to catalog each and every one of the documents from the same portal, so that the robot can find them easily. We could identify as a kind of "map" to the articles that are on the same platform.

In the documentation classification factors such as the full text of each article, the publication site, the author's name and the frequency with which it has been cited and relevant citations are taken into account, in other specialized sources in the same sector.

The references and citations The most relevant ones appear at the top of the page, in the same way that it happens with Google searches. In addition, it has a custom search box on the occasion of greater effectiveness and precision of results.

Remember the following tutorial to improve the positions of the document you upload

What are dating

It is important to bear in mind that the documents that have more quotes or citations they will be the ones that appear first in the searches since it is understood that they are the most relevant.

The side of citations in google scholarlet the authors simply track the citations of their articles.

You can check who cites your posts, chart your citations over time, and calculate multiple genres of citation statistics. In short it represents a education tool which can greatly help us to obtain quality information.

Other options; Advanced searches

Actually, you have other options that are also interesting but are out of the box. Google University as some call it, for example, advanced google searches, which yields very exact data and that few of us practice. (It is like the normal search engine, but in the advanced version)

  • We enter the web from HERE to see the search screen.
  • For example, if we search for architecture books. We add the fields as in the following image. We recommend to go testing the different boxes without changing the one that indicates "File type" that we have initially put the PDF document. Although as you can testas, there is also the option for Excel, Word, DWF files, among many others.

We can find an infinity of books and documents on all subjects that we can imagine, is to have a «scientific Google» at home. So have try!

This last information is extracted from an article on this portal about we learn how to find free architecture books on the net, which is actually applicable to any subject given that we show portals to find free academic books and search techniques.

Another project that we already talked about was the street view of google maps in the face of urban planning to recognize the changes in cities, or the interesting Google Earth for the presentation of projects.

In short, we want to remember a tool that can be of great help when it comes to detecting and selecting information for our architecture, environment or any other sector projects.

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