Google scholar (GS)may beone of the greatest free search engine successes of the Internet age, more so as AI threatens to take over simple Google-like interfaces. As Nature asks in its editorial: Can GS survive the AI revolution?
In 2025, GS is used around the world by millions of scholars, researchers and health professionals due to its features and simple interface, making it popular among academics, librarians and clinicians.
Will Google Scholar Survive AI? Librarian assessment
Google Scholar's survival in the AI revolution depends on its ability to blend traditional keyword-based-algorithmic approaches with emerging AI-powered deep research technologies seen in many platforms in 2025 e.g., Elicit.com and Undermind.ai. Its strength is a large database of 400+ million peer-reviewed papers, but its interface and search algorithms are simplistic compared to agentic search tools. AI-powered searching can dig into the meaning of papers, context, and generate insights from diverse sources on the Web (e.g., papers, preprints, and datasets). AI tools seem to be outpacing search engines by offering real-time synthesis, natural language queries, and personalized recommendations.
If GS doesn’t integrate itself into the AI era, it may become a relic of the Internet age. Google has already embedded Gemini into its main search engine results and could do similar in future GS models. Will GS survive? If it evolves into an AI-powered platform but keeps many of the features users have come to value. If it stays the same, it'll be replaced by one of the newer AI-powered tools emerging in 2025.
Search features and reviews
"...Google Scholar, as the most inclusive resource, should be used with other established resources...advances in AI may facilitate its use for scientific purposes." - Falagas, 2025
GS has always provided Google's trademark easy searchability — pop in your keywords and browse — of course, all of it could change with AI.
As GS nears ~400 million documents in size, it may be the largest search engine (or, index) ever conceived for scholarly purposes. It continues to be used to locate peer-reviewed content and grey literature produced by government and other agencies; and, includes a range of publishers such as Springer-Nature, Elsevier, JSTOR and others. It points to more websites, journals and languages than others; and is useful for browsing and pre-searching. Since it weights citation counts highly in its algorithms, it has been criticized for its Matthew effect; highly cited papers appear first in search results and gain more citations while new papers don't appear highly and get less.
By locating scholarly digital content and pointing to articles online, GS has also worked with libraries to point to materials on library shelves (see library links). Its "All versions" feature provides access to free-fee fulltext (preprints and early drafts) and its handy "Cited by" feature links to articles that cite the one being viewed. "Related articles" presents lists of closely-related articles and ranks them. In response to the release of Microsoft's Academic Search tool, an importing feature was included for RefWorks, Reference Manager, EndNote and BibTeX (seeciting). GS also added a pull-down menu in the search display to limit searches to a range of years. US legal opinions and cases were made searchable in 2010 using the appropriate radio buttons on the front page; e-mail alerts are also available from the results display.
Limiting to Canadian materials only is not possible; site:ca command limits results to Canadian sites but relevant results may be missed.
Another way to retrieve Canadian articles is by using the journal name to limit results. In Advanced Search, add can OR canada OR canadian to the publication box. However, this string will return not just journal articles but other materials as well. Moreover, the search will omit any Canadian articles that do not have “Canada” or “Canadian” in their name and articles where Canadian is abbreviated (e.g. CBLJ).
In searching for articles in specific subject domains, limit to specific journals; ensure you include all ways the journal may be cited. Google does not allow you to truncate search terms.
The 'intitle: operator limits to “Canada” or “Canadian” in the title (e.g. intitle:canada OR intitle:canadian) and is not recommended. Although scholarly material in Google Scholar is international, there is an American bias but there are enough Canadian resources to make it worthwhile.
Quality, content
For years, GS has been criticized as being hampered by poor design and quality control. Metadata is particularly problematic when using GS primitive exporting. When searching for items based on publication dates, results are inflated and unreliable. Other features such as citation tracking are inflated as much as 50%, and yet many scholars cling to their inflated counts and metrics. Strangely, search yield increases for some topics when limiting in GS by year ranges (ie. 2020-2025). Critics say that GS has a counterintuitive presentation, but many researchers are used to it. The longstanding problem is secrecy about its coverage, its refusal to publish the names of journals it crawls and the mystery around the PageRank algorithm. Consequently, it is impossible to know how current or exhaustive searches are. Where searches do not have requirements for optimal recall, GS finds favour with those who need a few articles and who want their searching to be on the open web and as simple as possible.
User-friendly as a browsing tool
GS is ideal for browsing peer-reviewed papers. Some librarians have studied its potential as a research tool with the general conclusion that it cannot compete with the power and flexibility of interfaces such as Ovid or EBSCO. Others question what content can be retrieved from GS but Google has never released this information - librarians are therefore left to make educated guesses about its coverage. The consensus seems to be that GS is not as current or comprehensive as other tools such as PubMed but it offers a quick and complementary view of findable materials. Being aware of its strengths and weaknesses and advanced search capabilities will help health librarians use and teach it effectively.
Step II: Enter two specific words describing what you want to find: hit search
Step III: browse' results
Enter up to 32 words (used to be 10).
Remember default is AND e.g. heart failure retrieves heart AND failure (no need to type AND)
type in "heart failure" to force a phrase search
Use OR to find related or synonymous terms
e.g. surgery AND dental OR dentistry OR dentist
Exclude words causing problems with a minus sign e.g. clinton hospital -president
Add terms to searches e.g. clinton hospital umass OR massachusetts
Results based on terms, then ranks them according to:
word frequency (how many times query words appear in each document),
word order (first terms in query are given greater weight),
word proximity (how close terms are to each other),
word location (e.g. in title or heading)
PageRank (Google's link popularity algorithm based on how many other pages link to this one similar to cited reference searching) among other complex statistical algorithms
Note: Please use your critical reading skills while reading entries. No warranties, implied or actual, are granted for any health or medical search or AI information obtained while using these pages. Check with your librarian for more contextual, accurate information.
