Google Scholar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| URL | scholar.google.com |
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| Type of site | bibliographic database |
| Registration | no |
| Owner | |
| Created by | |
| Current status | beta |
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 the world'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. Google Scholar nonetheless claims to cover more websites, journal sources and languages.[citation needed] 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.
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[edit] 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]
[edit] Features & specifications
Google Scholar allows users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether online or in libraries.[4]
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.[5] 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.[6]
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[edit] Criticism
Some searchers consider Google Scholar of comparable quality and utility to commercial databases,[7] 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.[8] 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]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Hughes, Tracey (December 2006) "An interview with Anurag Acharya, Google Scholar lead engineer" Google Librarian Central
- ^ Assisi, Francis C. (3 January 2005) "Anurag Acharya Helped Google’s Scholarly Leap" INDOlink
- ^ Barbara Quint : Changes at Google Scholar: A Conversation With Anurag Acharya Information Today, August 27, 2007
- ^ Google Scholar Library Links
- ^ Google Scholar Help
- ^ Official Google Blog: Exploring the scholarly neighborhood
- ^ Bauer, Kathleen, Bakkalbasi, Nisa (September 2005) "An Examination of Citation Counts in a New Scholarly Communication Environment" D-Lib Magazine, Volume 11, No. 9
- ^ Peter Brantley: Science Direct-ly into Google O'Reilly Radar, 3 July 2007
[edit] See also
- Academic databases and search engines
- Citation index
- CiteSeer
- getCITED
- Institute for Scientific Information's Web of Science
- Libra (Academic Search)
- Live Search Academic
- Scirus
- Scopus
[edit] 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 (November 2004). "Science searches shift up a gear as Google starts Scholar engine". Nature 432: 423. doi:.
- 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 (December 2005). "Science in the web age: Start your engines". Nature 438: 554–555. doi:.
- Critical review by Peter Jacso, librarian, at his digital reference shelf. (Nov., 2004)
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