Google Scholar is a popular tool for finding medical literature. It does offer some positives, including:
- Easy to use
- Broad searching across many topics
- Useful features, such as links for cited by and related articles
- Some free full text (look for a link with [PDF] or [HTML] to the right of article's information)
That said, it also has limitations, especially when compared to PubMed and Embase:
- Limited search options, including basic advanced search
- Unknown content coverage; no public master list
- Unreliable date filters
- No filters for study type
- Does not show how it is searching
- Lack of precision ranking
- No subject term searching, only keywords
- Does a poor job exporting citations
In short, Google Scholar has its place, but it better to start your medical research with PubMed and Embase. This is especially true for the type of advanced kind of searches you will need to build for things like systematic reviews.
