Google Scholar launched in 2004 as a search service for academic literature.
The service was created to help users find scholarly papers, theses, books, conference proceedings, patents, and court opinions. It indexes material from publishers, universities, repositories, and other sources rather than functioning like a general web-search page.
Google Scholar became useful for locating academic citations and related research. Its results may link to a publisher’s page, an institutional repository, or a freely available copy, depending on what is indexed and what access is available.
A common mistake is to treat Google Scholar as a complete database of every academic publication. Coverage varies by discipline and source, and some full texts require payment or institutional access. Scholar also differs from Google Books, which focuses on searching the contents and bibliographic information of books.