Scholar pros and cons

Let's try to gather in a synthetic and immediate way the advantages and disadvantages of this tool. 

Strengths

• It has a very wide coverage, to date (2020) the widest among similar search engines and academic databases.
• It allows you to promote your scientific work, by creating a personal profile and by automatically calculating the citations that each publication receives
• We can save a library of documents available whenever we want on the web, exportable in the desired format.
• It allows you to stay up to date on what leading authors publish in a particular field, as well as on new results of a search we made in the past
• Finds many conference proceedings, preprints and Open Access literature
• In the U.S. version, it also allows the search for case laws and legal documentation

Weaknesses

• The most important one is that it does not offer real control over a search strategy, which is why often it is not considered reliable for a thorough Literature Review. Even if the coverage is wide we cannot: filter the type of document (article, book, thesis, report, etc.); use semantic descriptors, a thesaurus, filters by discipline. Boolean operators are only partially usable. In short, an expert search, like the one we can do on a database interface, is not really possible.
• Everything is entrusted to the ranking, but this is never an objective nor thorough operation, even if it looks like it. For example, we know that only the first thousand results are visible, as in Google Search, and sometimes less; so if the ranking has not placed an article in the first thousand we will never see it.
• In general, but this is true for all bibliometrics, giving priority to the number of citations in ranking produces a further unbalancing to the advantage of mainstream articles that, being at the top of results, have more chances to be read and consequently to be cited to the disadvantage of innovative literature or junior researchers.
• Besides, being the product of automated procedures it is subject to "gaming", i.e. possible alteration of citation results by people who want to manipulate for some reason the positioning of their articles or their citation indexes, similarly to what happens with Google Search.
• The quality of metadata is often low, citations can be double or incomplete and it does not provide the DOI of a document.
• It does not allow users to query or export bulk data through public APIs, such as Microsoft Academic. However, there are tools such as Publish or perish that may be useful, we will talk about it in the following video.

Let's take a look in this video at Scholar's advanced features.

Summary of the video

• If we want to have more control over our search we must use the advanced search interface. We can integrate two synonymous concepts using OR, exclude from our results a concept that does not interest us with NOT, limit our search to articles written by a particular author or published by a particular University. We can do all these things either by using the operators directly or by using the advanced search.
• If we often use Scholar then we can install the plugin in the browser that allows us to interact immediately with Scholar and to download or quote an article with complete metadata.
• As far as scientific validation is concerned, Scholar comes to the aid of users with the Metrics section that allows us to evaluate how much a particular journal or author is cited.
• Finally, it is possible to set an alert to stay updated on the new results that our research obtains over time.