Google Scholar

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Google Scholar (GS) is a freely-accessible web search engine that indexes scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Initially conceived by Alex Verstak and Anurag Acharya,[1][2] GS was released in beta in November 2004, and by August 2007 its index included most peer-reviewed online journals of the world's largest scientific publishers. It is similar in function to the freely available Scirus from Elsevier, CiteSeer, and getCITED, as well as the subscription-based tools, Elsevier's Scopus and Thomson ISI's Web of Science. GS nonetheless claims to cover more websites, journal sources and languages.

GS is intended to allow users to search for digital or physical copies of articles, whether they be online or in libraries. [3] Using its "group of" feature, it shows the various available links to the journal article. In the 2005 version, this feature provided a link both to subscription-access versions of the article and to free full text versions of articles; for most of 2006, it provided links to only the official versions. At present, in August 2007, results also include copies stored on university servers.

Through its "cited by" feature, GS provides access to citations of articles that have cited the article being viewed.[3] It is this feature, in particular, that provides the citation indexing previously only found in Scopus and Web of Science. Through its "Related articles" feature, GS 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.[4] In August 2008, Stuart Lewis noted that results from Google's main search had begun incorporating GS information, such as "cited by" and "related articles" data.[5]


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Criticism

Some searchers consider GS of comparable quality and utility to commercial databases,[6] 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 Web of Knowledge. Many search experts suggest that its functionality is severely hampered by poor database design. For example, when searching articles based on publication dates, GS results, like Google results, are unreliable, even inaccurate. The number of articles found in some searches, for example, increases when limiting to a range of years (e.g. 2000-2006) instead of decreases.

A significant problem with GS is the secrecy about its coverage. Some publishers do not allow it to crawl their journals (as of April 2007 the absentees notably include most Elsevier titles, and the most recent years of the American Chemical Society journals); it refuses to publish a list of scientific journals crawled; its frequency of updates is unknown. It is therefore impossible to know how current and/or exhaustive searches are in GS. Nonetheless, it allows easy access to published articles without the difficulties that are encountered in some of the most expensive commercial databases.

Google Scholar has also drawn complaints for complicity in cloaking.

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Notes

This article incorporates material from the article Google Scholar on Wikipedia, which is licensed under the GFDL.

  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. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Google Scholar Library Links (accessed 15 August 2007).
  4. ↑ Luiz Barroso, "Exploring the scholarly neighborhood" (22 August 2006), official Google blog. Accessed 15 August 2007.
  5. ↑ Stuart Lewis, "Google bring Scholar richness into normal search results" (13 August 2008).
  6. ↑ e.g. [1]
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External links

Retrieved from "http://www.eurekajournalwatch.org/index.php/Google_Scholar"
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