Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.
Google Scholar is Google’s academic platform that includes:
- Articles
- Reports
- Online books
- Theses
- Abstracts
- Court opinions
and other materials from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories. We can say that Google Scholar is a Web search engine that specifically searches scholarly literature and academic resources.