Medical searches: PubMed and Google Scholar

Medical literature searches: a comparison of PubMed and Google Scholar    Nourbakhsh E, Nugent R, Wang H, Cevik C, Nugent K. Health Information Libraries Journal  2012 Sep;29(3):214-22.    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22925384


Background:
Medical literature searches provide critical information for clinicians. However, the best strategy for identifying relevant high-quality literature is unknown.

Objectives:
We compared search results using PubMed and Google Scholar on four clinical questions and analysed these results with respect to article relevance and quality.

Conclusions:
PubMed searches and Google Scholar searches often identify different articles. In this study, Google Scholar articles were more likely to be classified as relevant, had higher numbers of citations and were published in higher impact factor journals. The identification of frequently cited articles using Google Scholar for searches probably has value for initial literature searches.



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