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Google Scholar

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 193.60.133.201 (talk) at 10:51, 18 December 2009 (→‎Features and specifications: not yet available to the Google API). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Google Scholar
Type of site
bibliographic database
OwnerGoogle
Created byGoogle
URLscholar.google.com
Registrationno

Google Scholar is a freely-accessible Web search engine that indexes the full text 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. It is similar in function to the freely-available Scirus from Elsevier, CiteSeerX, and getCITED. It is also similar to the subscription-based tools, Elsevier's Scopus and Thomson ISI's Web of Science. Its advertising slogan — "Stand on the shoulders of giants" — is a nod to the scholars who have contributed to their fields over the centuries, providing the foundation for new intellectual achievements.

History

Google Scholar arose out of discussion between Alex Verstak and Anurag Acharya, both of whom were then working on building Google's main web index.[1][2]

In 2006, in response to release of Microsoft's Windows Live Academic Search, a potential competitor for Google Scholar, a citation importing feature was implemented using bibliography managers (such as RefWorks, RefMan, EndNote, and BibTeX). Similar features are also part of other search engines, such as CiteSeer and Scirus.

In 2007, Acharya announced that Google Scholar had started a program to digitize and host journal articles in agreement with their publishers; an effort separate from Google Book Search, whose scans of older journals do not include the metadata required for identifying specific articles in specific issues.[3]

Features and specifications

Google Scholar allows users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether online or in libraries.[4] Google Scholar is relatively quick and easy to use. “Scholarly” searches will appear using the references from “’full-text journal articles, technical reports, preprints, theses, books, and other documents, including selected Web pages that are deemed to be “scholarly.’” [5] Because most of Google Scholar's search results link directly to commercial journal articles, a majority of the time users will only be able to access a brief summary of the articles topics, and small amounts of important information regarding the article, and possibly will have to pay a fee to access the entire article.[6] Google Scholar is as easy to use as the normal Google web search can be, especially with the helpfulness of the "advanced search" option, which can automatically narrow search results to a specific journal or article.[7] The most relevant results for the searched keywords will be listed first, in order of the authors ranking, the amount of references that are linked to it and their relevance to other scholarly literature, and the ranking of the publication that the journal appears in.[8]

Using its "group of" feature, it shows the available links to journal articles. In the 2005 version, this feature provided a link to both subscription-access versions of an article and to free full-text versions of articles; for most of 2006, it provided links to only the publishers' versions. Since December 2006, it has provided links to both published versions and major open access repositories, but still does not cover those posted on individual faculty web pages;[citation needed] access to such self-archived non-subscription versions is now provided by a link to Google, where one can find such open access articles.

Through its "cited by" feature, Google Scholar provides access to abstracts of articles that have cited the article being viewed.[9] It is this feature in particular that provides the citation indexing previously only found in Scopus and Web of Knowledge. Through its "Related articles" feature, Google Scholar presents a list of closely related articles, ranked primarily by how similar these articles are to the original result, but also taking into account the relevance of each paper.[10]

At December 2009, Google Scholar is not yet available to the Google Ajax API.

Criticism

Some searchers consider Google Scholar of comparable quality and utility to commercial databases,[11] even though its user-interface (UI) is still in beta. The reviews recognize that its "cited by" feature in particular poses serious competition to Scopus and ISI Web of Knowledge, although it generally returns fewer results than subscription services.

A significant problem with Google Scholar is the secrecy about its coverage. Some publishers do not allow it to crawl their journals. Elsevier journals were not included before mid-2007, when Elsevier began to make most of its ScienceDirect content available to Google Scholar and Google's web search.[12] As of February 2008 the absentees still included the most recent years of the American Chemical Society journals. Google Scholar does not publish a list of scientific journals crawled, and the frequency of its updates is unknown. It is therefore impossible to know how current or exhaustive searches are in Google Scholar. Nonetheless, it allows easy access to published articles without the difficulties encountered in some of the most expensive commercial databases.

Google Scholar has problems identifying publications on the arXiv preprint server correctly. Interpunctuation characters in titles produce wrong search results, and authors are assigned to wrong papers, which leads to erroneous additional search results. Some search results are even given without any comprehensible reason.[citation needed] Google Scholar was not developed to aid someone who is seeking out intense medical clinical questions, but was developed to share the basics of what the importance of the topic is.[13]

Notes

  1. ^ Hughes, Tracey (December 2006) "An interview with Anurag Acharya, Google Scholar lead engineer" Google Librarian Central
  2. ^ Assisi, Francis C. (3 January 2005) "Anurag Acharya Helped Google’s Scholarly Leap" INDOlink
  3. ^ Barbara Quint : Changes at Google Scholar: A Conversation With Anurag Acharya Information Today, August 27, 2007
  4. ^ Google Scholar Library Links
  5. ^ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1324783/
  6. ^ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1324783/
  7. ^ http://web.library.emory.edu/services/ressvcs/howguides/googlescholar.html
  8. ^ http://scholar.google.com/scholar/about.html
  9. ^ Google Scholar Help
  10. ^ Official Google Blog: Exploring the scholarly neighborhood
  11. ^ Bauer, Kathleen, Bakkalbasi, Nisa (September 2005) "An Examination of Citation Counts in a New Scholarly Communication Environment" D-Lib Magazine, Volume 11, No. 9
  12. ^ Peter Brantley: Science Direct-ly into Google O'Reilly Radar, 3 July 2007
  13. ^ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1324783/

See also

External links

  • Google Scholar website
  • Interview with Google Scholar lead engineer/creator from December 2006
  • Google Scholar: The New Generation of Citation Indexes. Libri 55(4): 170-180.
  • Google Scholar Versus Metasearch Systems (March, 2006).
  • Butler, Declan (2004). "Science searches shift up a gear as Google starts Scholar engine". Nature. 432: 423. doi:10.1038/432423a. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  • Commercial Search Engines, International Databases or Traditional Libraries? Journal of Hydraulic Research, 43 6: A85-A87, 2005
  • Impact of Commercial Search Engines and International Databases on Engineering Teaching and Research, European Journal of Engineering Education, 32 3: 261-269, 2007.
  • Research Quality, Publications and Impact in Civil Engineering into the 21st Century. Publish or Perish, Commercial versus Open Access, Internet versus Libraries ? Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering, 34 8: 946-951, 2007.
  • Giles, Jim (2005). "Science in the web age: Start your engines". Nature. 438: 554–555. doi:10.1038/438554a. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  • Critical review by Peter Jacso, librarian, at his digital reference shelf. (Nov., 2004)
  • Publish or Perish calculates various statistics, including the h-index and the g-index using Google Scholar data. This service requires downloading a program, which is available in PC and Linux formats (no Mac format)
  • CIDS discerns self-citations for calculating h-index and g-index based on Google Scholar data; check the output sample.

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