DOI: 10.36347/sjams.2017.v05i12.035

Pages: 4967-4972

Google Scholar has been met with both enthusiasm and criticism since its introduction in 2004. However, several authors suggest that Google Scholar should not be the first or sole choice when searching for patient care information, clinical trials, or literature reviews. Thorough review and testing of Google Scholar are necessary to better understand its strengths and limitations. PubMed, utilize search inter¬faces that offer a greater variety of advanced features. These additional features, while powerful, often lead to a complexity that may require a substantial invest¬ment of time to master. To assess and compare the literature retrieved from Google Scholar and PubMed database using oral health related keywords. A cross-sectional observational study was carried out. The official home pages of PubMed and Google Scholar were searched using ten oral health related keywords to identify and extract information regarding the various characteristics of these databases. All the keywords were searched with use of parentheses (“ ”) as a Boolean operator to limit the search to required area of focus. The results included were those published between January 2015 to January 2016 to limit the number of results retrieved. In nine of the ten searches, Google Scholar returned larger retrieval sets than PubMed. Most items retrieved by Google Scholar were journaled articles. Items in other formats included: journal article, book citation, book reviews, and others. These results yielded few gray literature items. Google Scholar does not appear to be a replacement for PubMed, though it may serve effectively as an adjunct resource to complement databases with more fully developed searching features.