Google Scholar has long been the go-to academic search engine for academic research, providing access to a vast corpus of scholarly literature. However, as Google faces financial uncertainty and the lack of regular updates, the future of this research tool remains unclear. This means researchers need to explore alternatives that can optimize their workflows.
SciSpace is an excellent choice if you’re looking for websites similar to Google Scholar. In addition to a vast manuscript collection and advanced search capabilities, SciSpace offers an integrated platform with AI-powered analysis and writing assistance to simplify literature discovery, review, and writing workflows.
This article will analyze how SciSpace and Google Scholar compare across key parameters like search and discovery, reading comprehension support, customizability, and ease of use. It should help researchers decide if SciSpace is the right Google Scholar alternative for them.
SciSpace and Google Scholar: A Quick Overview
SciSpace and Google Scholar aim to make academic research workflows more manageable but take different approaches.
What is SciSpace?
SciSpace is an all-in-one research platform that combines search, reading comprehension aids, writing tools, and more. Its AI assistant summarizes papers, answers questions, and explains dense text and theories in plain language. The goal is to simplify every step, helping you work smarter.
What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar focuses specifically on discovery through its academic search engine. Google Scholar has a comprehensive database with publications, such as papers, books, case laws technical reports, and abstracts. Users can filter the search results by disciplines, dates, authors, and publications. Citation metrics are provided to measure the impact of the publications.
How to use SciSpace?
- Go to the SciSpace website in your browser.
- Enter a keyword, question, or article title in plain language into the search bar to find relevant papers.
- Review the summarized insights on the literature review table to assess top papers quickly.
- Select papers to read in-depth based on relevance, recency, citations, etc.
- Read a paper in SciSpace's reader. Use Copilot to get explanations by highlighting text or cropping equations and tables.
- Make notes and highlights as you read to capture critical takeaways and your thoughts.
- Ask Copilot follow-up questions if you need clarification on concepts, results, etc.
- Export the literature review table as CSV to share insights with colleagues.
- Save the literature review workspace to continue your analysis seamlessly later.
- Access your notes and highlights from the integrated notebook to review critical learnings.
How to use Google Scholar?
- Open Google Scholar in your web browser.
- Sign in by clicking the Sign In button in the upper right corner and entering your Google credentials. This allows you to access features like saving searches and creating alerts.
- Enter your search terms or phrase into the search bar. You can use keywords, title of the article, author names, publications, etc.
- Use advanced search options like publication date filters, author name searches, patents, and citations to refine your query by clicking the arrow next to the search bar.
- Review the search results. Google Scholar provides scholarly articles, abstracts, books, legal opinions, and more from various disciplines.
- Look for Full Text or PDF links to find and access complete documents instead of just abstracts. Some may be freely available, while others require library access.
- Check Cited by numbers to gauge the impact of an article. Click the link to see works that cited the paper.
- Use the Save button to add interesting papers to My Library to access later from the Google Scholar homepage.
- You can export citations from Google Scholar in formats like BibTeX by clicking the Cite link below each result.
- Set up alerts for your search to get notifications on new matching papers — access alerts from the Google Scholar homepage.
SciSpace and Google Scholar: 8 Key Differences to Consider
Let's compare these two online databases and analyze how they stack against each other based on critical parameters.
1. Corpus size
SciSpace is one of the largest academic search engines that provides access to a massive collection of academic papers, with over 280 million indexed from various publishers and countries. Nearly 100 million of these papers are available for full-text access.
The platform also enables researchers to augment this database by allowing users to upload their collection of PDFs into SciSpace. Their Chrome extension integrates SciSpace's AI assistant into publisher websites like Nature, ScienceDirect, Wiley, and more. You can leverage SciSpace's reading and comprehension tools while browsing these repositories.
Now, let's talk about Google Scholar. While it hasn't revealed exact figures, it's estimated to have indexed over 389 million documents across journals, books, court opinions, and more. This makes it a great way to explore diverse scholarly literature across disciplines and content formats.
Google Scholar provides free full-text access to many of these documents, especially if you're affiliated with a university or institution with subscriptions. You can customize settings and use library links to access full text through your university's subscriptions. Google Scholar also saves citations and scholarly articles to read later.
While Google Scholar has a larger corpus, it lacks SciSpace's versatility and expansion features.
2. SciSpace Vs. Google Scholar's search results
SciSpace offers a semantic search that helps users find relevant papers quickly by understanding context and meaning. Users can search by paper, author, topic, journal, and institution and ask questions using everyday language. It allows users to discover new papers by browsing the author's work, related scholarly articles, and references.
SciSpace can also summarize critical insights from the top 5 papers for your keyword or query, providing users with a quick overview. You can also interact with the AI assistant and ask follow-up questions on these summaries, helping clarify concepts or details.
Google Scholar relies on keyword searching using Boolean operators, quotation marks for phrase searching, and wildcards across its vast index of scholarly content. It enables searching by author name, publication, and date ranges to filter results. While Google Scholar lacks SciSpace's contextual search capabilities, it compensates through its massive corpus size and citation metrics, allowing researchers to cast a wide initial net and assess impact—critical features like full-text access, related articles, and cited links further aid discovery.
SciSpace provides a search experience optimized for precision through semantic search, while Google Scholar offers broad discovery across content.
3. Reading comprehension aids for advanced search
SciSpace offers an innovative AI assistant, Copilot, that lets you highlight text sections and get explanations in plain language. You can snip equations, tables, and diagrams to understand their meaning and implications. Copilot also answers questions about the paper, breaks down jargon, and summarizes sections upon highlighting texts or paragraphs.
Moreover, Copilot supports multiple languages — fluent in over 75. You can comprehend research in whatever language you're comfortable with and get solid, citation-packed answers to your questions.
On the other hand, while Google Scholar offers useful search and discovery features like saving citations and articles to your library, citation metrics, and keyword search, it lacks native reading comprehension aids. Researchers have to rely on external sources to understand papers, which disrupts their reading workflow and hampers efficiency.
SciSpace has a clear edge regarding reading comprehension support through its AI assistant. Its instant explanations can be a game-changer for researchers as they no longer have to spend hours making sense of content.
4. Literature review workflows
SciSpace is perfect for the literature analysis phase, as it offers an AI-powered workspace that helps you extract high-quality and in-depth insights from papers without scanning through each document separately. You can start by entering a search query in the SciSpace repository or a folder with your uploaded PDFs. SciSpace will then list the most relevant papers and excerpts about the study's limitations, contributions, results, and other important information for each paper in a table format.
You can adjust this table to fit precisely what you're looking for, play around with columns, add or remove papers, use filters, and sort studies to spotlight the ones that matter most to you. You can compare them side-by-side. Plus, Copilot is there to provide real-time, citation-backed explanations and answer any questions.
On the other hand, Google Scholar is more focused on paper discovery. You can use keywords, author names, publications, and date filters to find relevant papers. It also provides access to the full text, citation metrics, and related articles. However, it only offers a little direct assistance with synthesizing findings during the core literature review process.
So, in summary, you can use SciSpace to efficiently analyze papers and Google Scholar to cast a wide net and find influential works.
Check out a side-by-side comparison of SciSpace vs. Google Scholar — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zK-ZaM4Bs4
5. Collaboration features
SciSpace has a few sharing options available to its users. You can export the literature review workspace in CSV, BibTex, RIS, and XML formats and share it with your team or research group. However, it is not possible to collaborate with others within SciSpace in real-time on the same workspace. Another helpful feature is the ability to share Copilot's responses as links, which can be sent to your peers via email or shared on social media.
Google Scholar, too, does not have many built-in features tailored specifically for collaboration. However, you can save papers to a Google Scholar library and share that library with peers. The citation export formats supported can also help collaborate.
SciSpace tries to facilitate research collaboration directly, while Google Scholar offers secondary aid by allowing library and citation sharing.
6. Customization features
SciSpace provides you with a variety of options to customize your experience. You can upload and read PDFs in the reader while getting real-time AI explanations from Copilot. You can also customize columns in the literature review workspace to extract only the necessary insights. Specify your preferred language and depth of Copilot responses to ensure AI explanations are tailored to your needs.
The Notebook feature helps you to organize all your research notes in one place. Jot down notes as you read, track them to sources, and collaborate with the AI writing assistant. You can change the order of your notes or export them and your workspace. You can also seamlessly share your notes and workspace with colleagues.
On the other hand, Google Scholar enables you to adjust search settings to filter results by date range, including patents, etc. You can link your library account to access full text journal articles through institutional subscriptions and export citations in formats like BibTeX. Further, you can create email alerts for new results on your topic and save articles to a personal library to access later.
However, Google Scholar doesn't offer advanced custom capabilities like SciSpace.
7. Integrations and add-ons
SciSpace integrates directly with Zotero for importing and exporting papers between the two platforms. They also offer a ChatGPT integration called 'SciSpace GPT' tailored for researchers' workflows and needs. The SciSpace Chrome Extension can simplify technical language and explain jargon, acronyms, and complex paragraphs across the web.
On the other hand, Google Scholar can export citations in formats like BibTeX that can be used across platforms. The Google Scholar button extension adds a browser button for easy access to Google Scholar from any web page. It allows you to find full text on the web or in your university library, transfer your query from web search to Scholar, format references in widely used citation styles, and save the article to your Scholar library. It also provides instructions for configuring library links for off-campus use.
Some third-party tools and browser extensions integrate with Google Scholar, like Paperpile and Scholar H-Index Calculator for Google Chrome.
However, Google Scholar does not have the same depth of native integrations and add-ons as SciSpace. It relies more on third-party tools for expanded capabilities.
8. Ease of getting started
Google Scholar is a great place to start for researchers due to its simple interface that doesn't require creating an account. Users can quickly search for and access research papers without hassle. This makes it an attractive option for those who need quick answers or are just starting their research journey.
On the other hand, SciSpace requires more upfront investment to unlock its full potential. However, the platform offers an intuitive interface and provides tutorials and customer support to help new users get started. Its guided tour feature makes it even more appealing. Copilot and the literature review workspace enhance the accessibility, while the Zotero integration helps with uploads.
Icing on the cake? You can also use SciSpace Copilot chrome plugin on Google Scholar database and compare insights on the top results for your query!
Moreover, users can ask questions in plain language, and the search algorithm will provide relevant results, making the process even more convenient.
The final word: SciSpace or Google Scholar
SciSpace and Google Scholar, despite being researchers' go-to academic databases, both have unique strengths as research tools. SciSpace offers an integrated platform with AI-powered analysis and writing assistance.
Google Scholar focuses solely on literature discovery through search. SciSpace's comprehension, writing, and reference management tools make it a compelling choice for those seeking an end-to-end solution. However, Google Scholar's simple search interface may suit those exploring literature independently. Ultimately, the choice depends on your needs.
If you're ready to take your research productivity to the next level, give SciSpace a spin for free and experience how AI can transform your workflow.
Darek Haftor
Frequently Asked Questions
1: Is Google Scholar reliable?
Yes, Google Scholar is generally considered reliable for academic research. However, it's important to verify information found on Google Scholar with other sources, especially for critical or sensitive topics.
2: Are Google Scholar articles peer reviewed?
Some articles on Google Scholar are peer-reviewed, but not all of them. You can check the peer-reviewed status of individual articles on the database.
3: How often Google Scholar update its database?
Google Scholar is updated regularly whenever new academic content is published and indexed by the platform. To stay updated with the latest papers, you can explore SciSpace which has 280M+ articles.
4: Where can I find articles other than Google Scholar?
You can find articles on other platforms like SciSpace, PubMed etc.
5: How do I cite articles on google scholar?
To cite articles on Google Scholar, click on the "Cite" button beneath the search result. Then, choose your preferred citation style and copy the citation provided.
6: What is h-index in google scholar?
The h-index in Google Scholar measures a researcher's impact by considering how many papers they've published and how many times those papers have been cited.
