How Associations can Benefit from using Google Scholar

A Marketing article written by Lynne Newbury

Google Scholar is becoming more popular for those searching the web for full texts of scholarly literature across a variety of publishing formats, from books, to research articles to theses and other abstracts.

It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. However, be aware that some links you are taken to ask for payment to view the full text.

Google Scholar ranks documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature.

Go to scholar.google.com – you will notice the search screen looks very similar to Google. If you click on the drop down triangle – you can be more specific about what you’re searching for.


The search results in Google Scholar look slightly different to a normal web search – you’ll note:

  • The title of the article will link either to the full article (if available) or the abstract (short version).
  • Your search results will be sorted by relevance, not by date.

To find newer articles, use the filters in the left side bar, such as:

  • "Since Year" to show only recently published papers, sorted by relevance
  • "Sort by date" to show just the new additions, sorted by date
  • the envelope icon to have new results periodically delivered by email

Abstracts are freely available for most of the articles, however, you may need to get a subscription to read the full article.

  • ‘cited by’, below the entry means a running count of other papers or articles that have cited that particular article, and therefore, may show other similar articles on the same topic.
  • ‘related articles’ shows related or similar articles

All Versions lists how many times the article has been updated, and you can view all versions.

You can also sign up for alerts or be advised when someone cites your article. Click on the ‘about google scholar’ at the bottom of the search page to find all this and more or go directly to:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/scholar/about.html to read more.

If your association has publications specific to your industry or you sell your publications online, you can possibly be in the search results of Google Scholar. If you’d like more information on how to be included in the results, click to read this inclusion guideline.