As I understand it Google Scholar is one of the most widely used research databases out there. There are certainly alternatives from other companies, like Web of Science or Scopus, but I don’t think the competitors have the breadth or depth that Google Scholar has. Google itself is a web search behemoth, so it isn’t terribly surprising that when it decided to put skin in the research indexing game, it would also dominate. Yes, sport science and strength and conditioning has SportDiscus and the Physical Education Index, but Google Scholar doesn’t miss much research.
Anyway, I recently stumbled on a pretty neat tool that Google released not too long ago, called the Google Scholar Button. This is a nifty little Chrome App (and Firefox extension) that lets you search for articles by highlighting the title of an article, then clicking the button.
It will search for the article, give you a link to the PDF, if Google Scholar has it, and a couple of other neat features, such as giving you related articles, formatted citation, and open the Google Scholar search page for the highlighted title. Pretty neat, and should save a few minutes when you’re trying to track down a PDF or related articles.
Check it out: Google Scholar Button