What are they good for?

Google is good for:

  • Finding general information. If you know very little about a subject, then Google is a good place to start to get some basic background information and learn what vocabulary is being used to discuss the subject.
  • When you know or suspect that a specific website has information that is relevant to you but the site’s own search function isn’t able to find it for you (use the site: operator – click here for information on operators).

Google Scholar is good for:

  • Wide searching, as its coverage is likely to be wider than any single bibliographic database.
  • ‘Quick and dirty’ searches when you just want a general picture of what is being published in the scholarly literature, or you just want to see if anybody is writing about it at all.
  • When you want to track citations.
  • When you are dealing with a subject that doesn’t match up to bibliographic database keywords very well, and a text search of fulltext articles will be more likely to gain good results.
  • When you want to include ‘grey’ literature.
  • Looking for fulltext articles. GS may identify more fulltext articles than bibliographic databases.
  • Identifying highly-cited ‘important’ papers, as the number of times an article is cited is one of the factors GS uses to determine its position in search rankings. Furthermore, each search result has a ‘cited by’ link, with the number of times the article has been cited so it is possible to see which are the most-cited articles in a list.
  • Finding related articles, as each article search result has a link for ‘related articles’.

Bibliographic databases are good for:

  • When you need to do a complex search with limits that Google Scholar does not allow.
  • When your search is likely to be developed incrementally, as Medline and Embase allow you to build searches line by line, but Google Scholar does not.
  • When your search subject is one where it is an advantage to search keywords rather than fulltext, for example if your topic is likely to be referred to in passing in nonrelevant articles, or your most useful search term is also used in another way (e.g. a surname).
  • When you want the comfort of a formal, structured search that will reassure you that you have found at least most of the important information.
  • Precision. Assignment of keywords (when correct) makes it easier to construct searches with a high degree of precision.

What are they bad for?

Google 

  • Includes all the material crawled by Google. Much of it may be irrelevant, out of date, or unreliable.
  • Be aware that documents located by Google may not be the most recent version, especially if they are hosted on a site that was not their original source (e.g. out of date UKMi documents re-posted by other NHS organisations).

Google Scholar

  • This relies on automatic ‘crawling’ of sites to pick up metadata. If the metadata is wrong, or the bot does not crawl the site, then the result will either be wrongly indexed or absent.
  • Complex searches are difficult as Google Scholar does not have the range of limits that the bibliographic databases do.
  • Because keywords are not used, you have to search using words included in the articles you wish to find. This may be difficult if you are not familiar with the usual vocabulary used.
  • Reproducible results. Google updates its algorithms hundreds of times a year, and regularly re-crawls websites. Therefore, the same search terms may not get the same results in the same order if repeated on a different day, or in a different location. (Also applies to the wider Google.)

Bibliographic databases:

  • These rely on manual addition of records to the database, so this may be slow.
  • Keywords are added manually, so – given human error – they may be illogical, inconsistent, incomplete, or even absent.
  • Bibliographic databases generally do not include ‘grey literature’.

Note:

If it is essential that you find all of the information available on a subject, neither Medline, Embase, nor Google Scholar will be sufficient alone. The best course of action is to search all three.

Last Reviewed: Oct 2026