Google Scholar

What it is

Google Scholar searches academic literature: journal and conference papers, preprints, theses and books. For each result it shows where the paper appeared, who cites it and links to versions you can read, often a free preprint. Many researchers keep public Scholar profiles listing their papers and citation counts, and you can set email alerts for a search query or for a researcher's new papers.

Why it matters for higher studies

Applying to a research masters or PhD means finding the right research group and showing you understand its work. Scholar makes that practical. Search your topic, sort by recent years, and names that appear repeatedly are the active researchers. Open their profiles to see what they published in the last two or three years, not only their famous older work. Read two recent papers before you write to anyone. Later, Scholar helps you build a reading list for your statement of purpose or research proposal and check that your references are correct.

How to use it well

1. Use specific phrases in quotes, such as "graph neural networks" "drug discovery", and limit results to recent years.
2. Open "Cited by" on a key paper to find newer work that builds on it.
3. Use researcher profiles to check whether someone is still active in your topic.
4. Set alerts for your topic and for two or three researchers you are interested in.
5. Save papers to your library in Scholar or a reference manager.

Is it worth it?

Yes. It is free, fast and broad. Its limits: coverage and metadata are imperfect, citation counts include low-quality sources and favour older and more famous work, and results are not a ranking of quality. Do not judge a supervisor by citation numbers; read their work. For conference papers in computer science, check the conference website or DBLP for exact publication details.

Free or paid

Free. Access to some full texts depends on publishers, but many papers have free preprint versions linked in the results.

Common questions

Should I mention a professor's citation count in an email? No. Mention a specific idea from a recent paper and how it connects to your work.

Does a high citation count mean a good supervisor? Not necessarily. Look at recent activity, current students and where past students went.