London School of Economics: “…Google Scholar has advantages over traditional academic databases like Scopus and Web of Science: it’s free to use, requires no log in for searching, and has more comprehensive coverage, especially of non-journal sources such as books and theses. These benefits are particularly important for unaffiliated scholars without institutional access to resources, and those in the humanities. Google Scholar is used for many different kinds of academic information-seeking: finding the full text of an article, exploratory searches on a broad topic, forwards citation chasing (i.e. looking at where a publication has been cited), finding citation metrics to demonstrate research impact, and even systematic review searching. For each of these purposes there are different criteria for whether it is the best tool, or even appropriate to use at all. However, there are downsides to Google Scholar. Where most other academic databases have inclusion criteria for what will and will not be indexed, typically at journal level, Google Scholar relies on web scraping. Publications deemed excluded elsewhere on the grounds of poor quality or integrity concerns are likely to be picked up by Google Scholar. Even when there is clear evidence of citation manipulation papers are not removed, as evidenced in the case of Larry the Cat and his impressive H-Index. As AI generated publications proliferate, Google Scholar is particularly vulnerable to being swamped by fake research. Another key difference from most academic databases is that Google Scholar, like Google, ranks results. The algorithm for doing so is not transparent – studies have attempted to reverse engineer it, but they become dated very quickly. The ranking is probably based on a combination of the number of citations, number of times the searched words appear in title and full text, and date, with more recent research appearing higher. Many users of Google Scholar look only at the first few pages of results, as there are diminishing returns in looking beyond that.  Doing so may exacerbate the Matthew Effect, with highly cited works more likely to accrue future citations and the bias towards English-language publications…”