Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a freely accessible search engine that indexes scholarly literature across many formats and fields: journal articles, books, theses, pre-prints, technical reports, and more.  It also maintains a reputation score called h-index that’s quite popular among grant selection committees.

Why it matters

• It provides a broad search coverage, often finding material that more specialised subscription-databases miss—this can help in discovering diverse or lesser‐known literature. 
• It supports citation tracking: you can see which papers cite a given work and follow “cited by” chains. 
• For authors and labs, having a profile (with citations, h-index, i10-index) can help showcase research visibility. 
• It’s free and easy to access—especially useful in resource-constrained environments or when you need a quick retrieval of literature across disciplines.

How it works (in broad strokes)

1. You go to the Google Scholar site (for example the German interface at scholar.google.de, or other regional variants) and enter search keywords (author name, article title, topic).
2. The search engine returns results ranked by relevance which includes indicators like number of citations, links to full texts (when available) and related articles. 
3. If you create a Google account and a Scholar profile, you can list your publications, track citations, and set up alerts for new citations or new articles in your area.
4. Use the “Cited by” link under each result to explore downstream citing works, use “Related articles” to find similar works.
5. For authors: maintain your profile to ensure your publications are grouped correctly (avoiding duplicates, variant names) and your citation metrics are accurate.

Key features & advantages

• Wide disciplinary and format coverage: Articles, books, theses, pre-prints, reports across many languages. 
• Citation counts and metrics: Though not perfect, you get a quick view of how often a work has been cited and author profiles display h-index and i10-index. 
• Free access: No subscription required for basic use, making it accessible globally.
• Interoperable links: Many results link to full‐text versions (publisher sites, institutional repositories, PDFs), or show “all versions” so you can locate open versions.
• Alerts & library links: You can set up alerts for specific searches and integrate with your institutional library (via “Library links” settings) so you may access paywalled articles through your institution.