1. Easy access to information

Google Scholar, launched in 2004, is a multi-disciplinary search engine for scientific and academic documents, indexing international scientific literature: peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed journal articles, books, theses, texts deposited in open archives, pre-publications, patents, reports...

These documents come from a wide range of sources, and Google has forged numerous partnerships with publishers, learned societies, universities, libraries and research organizations, for example with Elsevier, and in France with INIST (Institut de l'information scientifique et technique) and ABES (Agence bibliographique de l'enseignement supérieur).

The advantages of Google Scholar are many:

• free of charge ;

• ease of access and use, making it a privileged point of...