Slashdot Mirror

Note also that the content is different. Google Scholar tries to include as many sources as possible, whereas Highwire's portal AFAIK searches only those journals hosted by Highwire Press.

By pointing this out I don't mean to denigrate Highwire. Rather, they publish a lot of journals that are important (to me) and they do a really good job of making online journals easy to use, unlike some other publishers. However, I, along with most biomedical types, almost always start my searches with PubMed. And the (not free) Web of Science is very useful at times too.

Google Scholar has to be looked at with this background: Even in its disappointing incarnation it is an asset for those scholars whose university or research institute cannot afford WoS or Scopus.

Many university libraries (e.g. our Carnegie Classification: Doctoral/Research Universities-Intensive university) cannot afford WoS. Even the review of WoS by Péter's Digital Reference Shelf does not mention the cost. Title: Web of Science Citation Indexes
Publisher: Thomson ISI
URL: http://www.isinet.com/
Cost: Depends on database combinations and time span
Tested: July 12-20, 2004
Google Scholar is not perfect but I find that it supplements MathSciNet well.

Thomson Gale's parent, Thomson, does own Thomson ISI, which produces the Web of Science.

In the reseach/acedmic world, a journal's "Impact Factor" can give you a good idea on the quality of the papers within it. The Impact Factor, determined by Thomson ISI, is the result of a mathmatical equation taking into consideration the citations of papers previously published in the last few years.

It works something like Slashdot's moderating system in that the readers of the journal determine its impact factor (and thus its credibility and prominence) by citing its papers. Publish good papers, more people cite them, your impact factor rises. Publish shit, nobody cites your journal, and your impact factor decreases.

The Impact Factor of a journal doesn't always reflect on the quality of all the papers. Sometimes a good paper is published in a poor journal, and, unfortunately, sometimes bad papers are published in good journals. The best way way to determine the quality of a paper is to just read it. If you are well versed enough in a scientific field to be doing research in it, you should be able to understand the experiments and analyze the results and look at controls and tell for yourself if it's BS or not.

IANAS, but I imagine that such review might take some $ to accomplish.

IAAS, and peer review takes zero $ to accomplish. The action editor (who works for love) emails the article (in PDF) to the reviewers (who work for love), who email their reviews back, whereupon the action editor makes the call - publish, revise, or reject. The publishers do not put any money into that system, and have indeed been scamming the public for years.

Establishing a solid reputation, quality control, and peer review process are challenges for any new journal, whether online or not. It can be done though - for instance, the free online Journal of Machine Learning Research has within the few years of its existence rocketed to the top of the journal citation reports in its field.

If you're willing to pay, this is exactly what Web of Science does. It contains just about every article from every journal for the last hundred years.

WoS uses citation indexing, as ISI has done for many years, since well before Google came into existance. You can find newer articles by finding those which have cited the old article you're looking at.

What I believe will be killed here is the commercial scientific indexing system ISI Web of Knowledge. Their interface is a real pain, and while they probably contain more data than Google Scholar at the moment, they are up for some really tough competition!

It is about time.

You really pressed one of my buttons here. Did you actually read the article and judge for youself or did you just assume that it was lousy based on the ISI impact factor? By the way the impact factor for the the journal in question, American Journal of Physiology, is in the "mid-range" (~3-4), but not horrible (there are journals with impact factors less than 1). In fact, the whole idea of impact factors is pretty controversial and has been abused as a criterion for promotions, grant awards, etc.

There's plenty of bullshit published in the "so-called" top tier journals (Science, Nature, Cell, etc.) and plenty of excellent science published in what you are calling a low-impact journal.

Also, the group working on nanobacteria had to revise their work seven times - this is an unheard of level of skepticism and suggests that there is an unusual level of politics going on here.

My workplace subscribes to SciSearch and I find it indispensible.

Being able to do keyword searches through titles and abstracts of articles from decades past has really been a boon to researchers.

It's unfortunate that the information is not freely available.

It would also be great if the full texts of old works were put online so searches in the bodies of these old papers were possible.

I won't read extensively on the screen; I'd need a handheld, lightweight, portable, bright, better than 300 dpi, at least 30 cm screen before I'd read online for extended periods.

Now, what's great is downloading and dumping PDF's to my printer.

It sure beats wandering around the periodical stacks and photocopying...

Have you noticed? Libraries are a lot more deserted than they used to be before the Web exploded.

ISI databases get me all moist.

What on earth is the "purpose of the web"???

Also, you probably shouldn't use Google to do research searches. Have you tried PubMed? It's one of the best, and free to search. Some non-free ones (which universities generally have subscription for) are BIOSIS Previews and ISI Web of Knowledge.

As a side point, I frequently use Google to look up stuff for reports at university, and am generally surprised at just how relevant the search results are, for a non-scientific web search engine. Google on!

Another invaluable resource for physics and some other hard sciences (I believe, as I only have first hand experience with physics) is The Web of Science (yes sort of a lame name), which is so superior to SCIDEX indicies it makes them almost laughable.

Unfortunately this service comes at a very steep price from what I've been told, and as such is only available to institutions willing to cover that cost (though most moderate sized and larger universities will have a subscription).

It's standard (though often unwritten) practice for many journals to require that any article they accept for publication have a minimum number of citations from previous articles in the same journal. These citations are counted in academic listings such as the ISI reports. Quoting from their website: "It presents quantifiable statistical data that provides a systematic, objective way to determine the relative importance of journals within their subject categories."

Not if researchers are adding extraneous notes to their article at the publisher's command!

Yea, right.

I can't find any indication any of this has been published in a peer reviewed journal.

I can't either. A search for "Narlikar JV" in the web of science returns a couple of papers on cosmology, but nothing on this subject.

The idea predates Google, it probably predates you. They did it in print, way back when.

Excellent Thread.

I've been thinking along the same lines for a while.

I think the key will be the "citation index", to use the scientific research term. Just like research papers.

Usually well documented code points back to where it came from, just like the web.
But more useful are forward pointing links.

ex:
"I see this really neat "pattern" from 6 months ago,
but it is not quite right,
let's look forward to see what someone had done with it, and perhaps they are closer to what I need."

This is exactly what scientific papers and such already have: citation indexes. I used the paper version (age showing) of "current contents" when doing research in a University environment. A version is now online here ISI: Online Current Contents .


A standardized set of XML-ish tags or commands to let the web spiders like Altavista or google find these sites would also be very useful...