Each Google Scholar search result represents a body of scholarly work. This may include one or more related articles, or even multiple versions of one article. For example, a search result may consist of a group of articles including a preprint, a conference article, a journal article, and an anthology article, all of which are associated with a single research effort.  Grouping these articles allows us to more accurately measure the impact of research and to better present the different research efforts in an area.

Each search result contains bibliographic information, such as the title, author names, and source of publication. One set of bibliographic data is associated with the entire group of related articles and is our best estimate at the representative article for the group. This bibliographic data is based on information from the articles in the group, as well as on citations to these articles from other scholarly works.