Standing on the shoulders of the Google giant: Sustainable discovery and Google Scholar’s comprehensive coverage.

Max Kemman:

Recent surveys have inquired about the use of discovery systems for academic literature. In a survey we conducted in 2012 with 288 Dutch respondents in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 88% used Google Scholar to some extent. JSTOR was a close second, used by 85%, although it was used less often. In a recent survey on 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication, a preliminary finding from the first 1,000 responses was that 92% used Google Scholar. Here Web of Science was a distant second, used by 47% of respondents. Although such surveys do not necessarily show how Google Scholar is used, it is clear that a large portion of scholars searches for literature at Google Scholar. One research report concluded in 2013 that “library and publisher platforms were not central to discovery, but Google and Google Scholar were”.