Google Scholar is a freely accessible
web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of
scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in
beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most
peer-reviewed online
journals of Europe and America's largest scholarly publishers, plus scholarly books and other non-peer reviewed journals. While
Google does not publish the size of Google Scholar's database, third-party researchers estimated it to contain roughly 160 million documents as of May 2014 and an earlier statistical estimate published in
PLOS ONE using a
Mark and recapture method estimated approximately 80-90 overage of all articles published in English.