Google Scholar is a search engine for scientific publications. There are alternatives like PubMed (not a search engine but a database, often used in the medical field), Semantic Scholar (also a database, but with richer annotations), Citation Gecko (to discover networks of forward- and backward-citations, which is handy to check for missed papers), all of which I’m using from time to time. Or new tools based on large language models like perplexity.ai or litmaps, which still have to show their value in the long run. Personally, I prefer Google Scholar. It casts the widest net among all these tools, covering not only journal publications but also conference preceedings, thesis publications, patents. This strategy also indexes crap from predatory journals, which is usually easy to spot for a scientist, but also some hidden gems that you would otherwise miss.

Google Scholar can be used not only as a search engine but is at the same time a tool to assemble the publications associated with a single researcher in a Google Scholar profile. Here are my pieces of advice on how to make the best use of your Google Scholar profile as a researcher in neuroscience (and related disciplines). Let me know if I missed something important!

1. Create a public Google Scholar profile

Once you have a Google account, it is pretty straightforward to create a Google Scholar profile. As soon as you have own publications associated with this profile, it also makes sense to make the profile public – this renders you searchable via Google scholar as a person with an ID. Since most people in the neurosciences are using Google Scholar (with a larger minority of medically-oriented or traditional researchers still preferring PubMed), this small step makes you more visible as a identifiable researcher, without having to go back to OrcID or other identifiers.

2. Curate your publications

From time to time, you will be informed by Google Scholar about new publications that are associated with your name. You can tell the algorithm to automatically update new publications (I’d choose this option only if you are very busy) or to decide by yourself each time (recommended). In the latter case, don’t forget to forward updates from Google Scholar in case you are not using the associated gmail account for your daily business.

Such a manual curation is a good use of your time to make your Google Scholar page useful to others and more readable. To do so, delete publications that are erroneously associated with your account. If publications that are listed separately are versions of the same study, merge them as shown below:

Sometimes, Google Scholar decides to include non-peer-reviewed scientific work in its search results, for example your thesis. I noticed that Google Scholar also includes posts of this blog post if they are structured like a scientific article and include a list of references. For example, the following email showed up when I posted a blog post reviewing papers on astrocytic physiology:

I believe it is nice that Google Scholar also picks up these instances of scientific output in its results, but I don’t include them on my Scholar profile in order not to confuse the profile’s typical human viewer.

In theory, it is possible to add your own items to Google Scholar, based on Github repositories or other scientific output that is not found by Google Scholar. However, I would not recommend it since it may appear as if you were trying to artifically inflate the number of publications in your profile.

3. Annotate shared first authorships

As most tools for literature search, Google Scholar normally does not display “equally contributing” first authors. For many projects in experimental neuroscience, however, two or more authors are “equally contributing”, without being reflected by Google Scholar’s author list. To fix this issue and to make your Google Scholar profile a more accurate reflection of your contributions to publications, you can click on an article, hit the “Edit” button and add asterisks (*) to the equally contributing first authors. Note that this procedure will update the author list in your Google Scholar profile but not in the Google Scholar search results. For example, an item may then appear like this:

4. Set up personalized alerts to stay up to date

Apart from being a useful web display of your publications, Google Scholar can also be used to keep you updated about current research related to your own publications. To do so, go to your Google Scholar profile page and click on the “Follow” button in the top right corner. This window will pop up:

Hit the checkbox “New articles related to my research”, and you will be informed via email about publications related to your own (published) research. From my experience, >90% of these “related publications” are irrelevant and can be ignored, while the remaining <10% are useful. It’s certainly better than relying on bluesky or other social media or going through table of contents of journals. The updates are quite independent of journal names and not biased by the usage of social media by a specific researcher. Therefore, it is also possible to spot relevant and well-done research published in smaller journals or by less prominent researchers, without losing track of “high profile” studies.

Of course, if you don’t have yet any publications, it does not make so much sense to receive alerts about publications related to your work. In this case, go to the Google Scholar profile page of your supervisor, scientific hero, postdoc colleague or anybody who in your opinion does great research. Then, hit the “Follow” button on his/her Google Scholar profile page and select “New articles related to this author’s research”, and you will be updated about research close to your interests.

Of course, getting updates about new research can be quite stressing sometimes, and it is impossible to fully stay up to date with the literature. If you have the feeling that you cannot keep up with the “related” literature anymore, that’s okay. Just cancel your Google Scholar alerts, do some real science and come back to literature search at a later timepoint. Of course, you may miss some of the hottest developments. But following all the newest trends and hot topics can also be stressful, and we all should do our very best to purge any sources of unnecessary stress and distraction from our work life as researchers.

5. Conclusion

I’m a big fan of Google Scholar. But it is always imporant not to get sidetracked by pure citation counts. Don’t judge a person based on their profile with its citation counts per year and numbers of publications. Always pick one or two first-author publications that you can judge scientifically, and check out what is behind the title, in the abstract, the figures, the methods sections, or the acknowledgements. Citation metrics can be manipulated and gamed, and nothing replaces the deep dive into real science.

Google Scholar also comes with quite a good documentation. Check it out! For further information about the background of Google Scholar, check out this article on Wikipedia.