In the paper What Google Scholar can(’t) do: Comparison oft he scholarly search in EconBiz and Google Scholar you can find some good reasons for using more than just Google Scholar for your scholarly literature search.
The topics discussed:
- The search interface of Google Scholar provides only few options to control your topical search.
- Google Scholar includes huge quantities of full-texts and references of all subject areas. The result lists of subject specific databases might be more precise.
- With its ranking, Google Scholar influences what search results you get to see. The sorting is not transparent and you cannot change it.
- Google Scholar is led by commercial interests. It is important that publicly funded search tools provide alternatives in the access to information.
- Google doesn’t always respect privacy and copyright laws.