Slashdot Mirror
Google Scholar: Not Ready for Prime Time?
reptilicus writes "The Thomson Gale publishing group has put together a comprehensive review of Google Scholar, and they find it highly lacking compared with similar offerings from Highwire Press, Scopus, and The Web of Science. Will Google's overhyped offerings drive these superior services out of the market?"
overhyped
overhyped? I dont recall ever hearing of it. of course I havn't heard of the others either..
"What does slashdotting mean?"
"You've never heard of slashdot?"
"I know it makes websites not work."
But it's still in Beta! Google would never release a service without taking it out of Beta first, of course.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
...isn't this still in alpha or beta stage? Give'em a break, already.
---
I can't get enough google articles. Give me more!
An article critical of google! I think my transmission link from my brain to slashdot groupthink just fused.
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If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Microsoft loved to put out something that was just good enough, but free to kill off everything else.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
At least for now...
IT'S FREE!
[looking at the other options, they are NOT free]
===
I'd say in that regard, Google is way ahead...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
What? A company whose mission is to provide content and research services to academia gives a poor review to one of its up-and-coming competitors' offerings? Say it isn't so!
CLICK the links on the side, the "related links". You'll see that "The Web of Science" and "Scopus" are PART of thomson gale.
Can we really be that surprised they said that google isn't that good?!
AccountKiller
Will Google's overhyped offerings drive these superior services out of the market? Maybe its just me, but I think that this wild speculation in every single article is unnecessary.
... oops :)
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
I didn't know Google Scholar existed until I downloaded the IE Toolbar and saw it as a search option. If I read a story about how Google is making their Scholar search engine better, chances are I'd be completely indifferent to it. I don't use it, so why should I care?
(That could change, since I start college in the fall. But I digress.)
Google's got their priorities, and the fact that they offer what they do for free is still pretty darn impressive. So what if it's not as good as the paid alternatives? It's free and it seems effective enough for the small market that's going to be using it...
Goo goo g'joob.
Overhyped? Google?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
As the article mentions, there are only two other multidisciplinary academic databases, web of science and scopus. Both are expensive. Google is free. I have access to (and use) web of science, and google blows it out of the water in terms of speed and user interface. Its database is generally pretty good too.
Not bad for free.
is to a new site demo. regular site is http://highwire.org/
google> World smallest penis
[I am feeling lucky]
result -> cmdrtaco.net
It's not news though, so it won't make it on slashdot.
A good question to may be how long has HighWire been around versus Google?
You can't expect a refined service out of a beta and compare it to a finished product...
It's like comparing the bud to a flower, the bud won't look as beautiful but it hasn't been given time to bloom...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
It's entirely another to organize it in a way that is meaningful to those attempting to access it.
The beta argument doesn't wash with me. Virtually everything Google is doing today is beta. It's a cutesy way to hide behind any mistakes in a production service, because you can always say, "whoops! well, remember, it's only beta!"
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Google is guilty of a bit of overconfidence, maybe, in expanding into areas they know little about, but I think Google Scholar is why there is a Google.
Google's founders were academics. Their focus is on creating ways to find information. Finding academic information ought to be their pet project.
The kicker is that if someone else does it better, Google will just buy them.
sigs, as if you care.
I am a researcher in Astronomy and I have found that Google Schalor is very lacking in my field. They have bigger competition in Astronomy than in most fields because all of the journal articles in Astronomy going back a century have been scanned, cross referenced and are available from the NASA/Harvard Database.
They have a long way to go to compete with that.
Censorship rests on the child's delusion that "If I shut my eyes so I can't see it, it isn't there".
Parent post hits it on the head. Why is Google overhyped? Because slashdot posts an article everytime someone there picks his nose.
Google Scholar is not an attempt to replicate repositories like citeseer and the like. It is a specialized search service! If I search for a paper using Scholar, I get links from many different repositories, and from the web site of the authors. That's what this is all about. Furthermore, as a researcher, I always use plain Google or Google Scholar to locate papers, and I do have access to every other service. Google is just better at it than any other service. Do you know why? Because it gets the job done without any brain damage search language, without broken links and it searches the whole web, not just your random journal list. Can Google Scholar improve? Sure, but the article is pretty biased against a free (as in beer) service.
Also, there are other great free indexes out there that are not even mentioned in the article, like DBLP.
That business about "otherwise very intelligent people have succumbed to stupidity by using Google Scholar to the exclusion of the other, much better services" sounds like the author has a personal or financial stake in WoS or Scopus. Or just a chip on his shoulder, axe to grind, whatever. Either way, the reviewer comes off sounding like an pompous asshole.
If you use Google Scholar and get what you need, then at least you didn't pay anything for the privilege. If they were charging money and it sucked, yeah, I could see someone whining about it. But for free?
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
But is still fun to google yourself. (So shameless!)
Google is on track to be the next IBM. That's right, extremely boring. Infact, it could be worse...maybe it will out-bore IBM and really turn into Google University. As far as I know, Google only has 2 half-decent services, search and gmail. Everything else is mostly crap, which creates some buzz initially and then everyone forgets about it, including Google itself. I'm sure google search is the best friend of online perverts. I mainly use it for browsing porn (google images...ah...can't wait for google video). Gmail is good because of AJAX. But I have clicked on an ad just ONCE in gmail, and I 've been using it for more than a year. Yep, Google is in a trade deficit with me.
At a career fair recently, google booth was visited by only about 5-10 people in a few hours. Microsoft booth must have had atleast 1000 people. Google mania is over.
Some kid in his garage can come out with the same services that Google is offering. That could be you ! There is no barrier on the internet...and Google would be obsolete by 2008.
If GMail isn't ready for prime-time, this outcome must be based upon Google's obsession with describing half it and many of it's other products as 'beta', despite a userbase of well over a million... http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0 2/13/0234221&tid=185&tid=156
For good non-google stories. Rolland Piquepaille is the best source for articles around here.
I can't comment on Astronomy but I can on Computer Science and I use Scholar on a regular basis. The alternative is CiteSeer, refered to in the article as "awesome". Well its definitely, not that! I am often greeted with "System Busy" messages and it can be a very frustrating process. After reading that it was hard to take the article seriously, that's not to say that Scholar can't be improved. Of course, the ACM and IEEE offer better services for me, as you would expect given the fact money is involved, but Scholar is one of many useful tools and especially for students as it is free.
Google Scholar certainly isn't a tool that any self-respecting scholar would use all or most of the time to find information. I certainly wouldn't encourage any research institution that can afford other services to forgo them in favor of Google Scholar... but I don't think Google Scholar would argue for that, either. When I've used Google Scholar, it's been because I needed to quickly find an article, usually one that I subsequently read through a link to a paid service which my university subscribed to. Since most of the articles require subscriptions, Google Scholar isn't much good by itself.
That said, why is this article being written? Why is it so incredibly one-sided? Other services are 'awesome' and "from Stanford University, the alma mater of many of the smartest Web developers whom you hear about every day," while Google isn't mentioned as also a product of former Stanford students? My guess is because the publishing company gets paid by the other services, and has in turn probably invested lots of resources in them. Google's getting access to information that Gale previously supplied to services like HighWire for a fee, and letting people access that information for free, in many cases.
Bottom line: the article's right, GS shouldn't be the only thing anyone uses. However, if it bought one of the companies that has marked everything up with tons of meta-data, I think we'd see something much better than the current pay services.
Two reasons: a) The services to which they are comparing Google Scholar are extremely expensive. It is like comparing free TV to a movie you pay see in the theater, and getting all bent out of shape because TV has commercials and isn't in widescreen. Well, duh. b) The reviewer is obviously biased. This is not a review, it is marketing for the other services that are "superior" to Google Scholar. You can see this kind of stuff on pretty much any product site. But that other crap isn't on the front page of /. being touted as a "review".
It seems to me TFA has have missed the point of Google Scholar. Web of science does abstract, keyword and title searches. And it's very good at them. Google Scholar does full text searches. If I want to know if there has been a study on the effects of ibuprofen on slugs (or whatever), I go to WoS. However, sometimes you want something in the details, which isn't mentioned in the abstract or title. I sometimes want papers that have used a particular statistical technique - I'm not (very) interested in the substantive content, I just want a nice example. WoS - no use at all. Google Scholar - excellent.
When you get your results, WOS gives you the abstract. Google Scholar points you to the full text source - often you have to pay for it, but you have it there.
People who get obsessive about systematically reviewing the literature and making sure that they have accessed everything on the subject are never going to use Google Scholar. People who want to know more about a subject are better off with Google Scholar.
On citation searches, WoS wins hands down (IMHO).
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Is it a replacement for, e.g. Citeseer? No. But then it isn't intended to be.
What Google Scholar provides is a useful metasearch across existing archives (like Citeseer, the IEEE, the ACM, and so on). It can be handy for finding odd connections between topics covered in different archives. It can also be handy for trawling through those archives using a different search algorithm than the defaults provided by the archive itself. I can't see Google Scholar ever replacing Citeseer - I see it continuing to complement Citeseer.
two of these 'competing services' are from the same place. so it's just two in reality.
Yeah, I have some papers to my name, and only google found them and the crossreferences. Others did not.
Google also found one which was published just last month.
So there.
looks like thses 'other services' are reacting to a possible threat. Shape up already.
Did you read about the hot new gadget at cooltechzone?
Has Google driven anyone out of the market?
(I really don't know)
If yes, did they actually have a truly better product/service?
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I am suprised that no one has mentioned pubmed [pubmedcentral.gov] as a (or THE) relevant competitor for scholar.google.com in the biotech world. With the exception of google's more robust search input capability, they are indistinguishable. Since google scholar is still in beta, I think that TFA is a bunch of crap.
E = m * c^(Hammer)
It works better than CiteSeer, with its poor overloaded little webserver, ever has.
And a version of CiteSeer that isn't going down all the time is basically all I need.
So I'm satisfied.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Or steal one.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Of course it's not ready for prime time, when it is, google will eliminate the BETA VERSION tag...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I was not sleeping properly, because there were no good quality news about google these days. Slashdot posters helped me out, thanks a lot!
Hint for Moderators:(you can) Mod this as FUNNY, "UNDERRATED".
Hint for Readers: Nothing new here, move on.
What's needed is an application that will search all of these databases and provide a unified interface to the user.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Web of Science is the worst user interface I have to deal with on any regular basis (including the awful All Music Guide). I think they took the interface from the CD-ROM version circa 1994 and ported it directly to web forms. Someone ought to do a GreaseMonkey update...
At least mine. Unless the colleges start showing it as a option, only the truely geeky of us will know of it. And those of us who do know of it would probably rather use something else.
I know at my college, people use only two search options: the ones they are told about by the librarians, namely Academic Search Premier, and plain vanilla Google.
Help cure cancer! Fold for slashdot: http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=
Or maybe it really is in beta?
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
I do research in medical image analysis, and I regularly use both Google Scholar and PubMed. I think that there's a big stylistic difference about how different people approach these searches. Going to college and grad school in the mid to late 90's into the 2000s, I grew up (academically, at least) with the idea that I should be able to just type a few words into a search bar and a bunch of related stuff would come up, without having to think too much about where in the document it was located and whether it was a keyword or whether I was searching for the institution or publisher or whatever.
... my parents like to go to Yahoo and descend down the well organized categories until they get what they want, whereas I just type a bunch of phrases into Google. I'm not saying one way is better than the other ... it's just a different style.
Older scientists grew up searching those big bound hardback science citation indices, where you had to think very hard about keywords and publishers and such. Even the abstract was more critical then, because you couldn't just grab articles willy nilly onto your desktop and then sort them out later.
I think of it like the difference between my parents and myself when searching for stuff on the web
That being said, Google Scholar does need a bit more polishing, but I still use it a lot. However, until you can grab citation info into Endnote or Bibtex, it don't see it replacing anything soon.
Any relationship to Thompson-West, who do massive databases of things like Westlaw? Why yes, there IS a relationship. That's why they think it's 'overhyped'...they are probably in a decent position to put together their own competing service.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
I don't think I'd put too much stock in that review. There are other online multidisciplinary databases that have been around for years and have lots of traffic that the author seems to know nothin of (e.g., getCITED, SSRN, etc.).
Fair enough. But at the same time:
I always hear about how great a place Google is to work, how smart all their staff are. Okay. So why are they getting hammered by search engine optimizers, and have been for years? Core business, people! You don't buy a summer condo when your house is falling apart at the seams.
Please help metamoderate.
What exactly is missing from the word 'hype' that it needs an 'over-' in front of it? Given that I haven't seen much said publicly about Google Scholar, that I've never seen grandiose claims made for it, and that most of my friends who don't need access to academic papers have never heard of it, I'm beginning to understand what 'overhype' means. It's a word you use when you want to generate hype, not about a product, but about the idea that it has been hyped. 'Overhype' is a word used to hype hype itself.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Since when was Google's offering in this field highly hyped? Or hyped much at all? Have you been reading slashdot again?
In my honest opinion, Google needs to pace themselves. I think they're expanding a bit too fast, putting their hands into too many projects all at once without ever concentrating on one single thing. They are spreading out at a rapid pace (Google Maps, Gmail, Google Scholar, Desktop Search, Deskbar, Google's Personalized Startpage, Groups, Froogle, Google Wireless, Google Sitemaps, Web accelerator, Picassa...)...
And with the growth comes a larger probability of mistakes. I'm already starting to see some cracks in some of their products. Nothing bad, really. Just.... I can tell they need to take their time and patch up some holes that they haven't had the time to do yet.
I'm one of Google's biggest fans. I think they're great! They just need to be careful. They don't want to confuse and overwhelm everyone.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
Google advantage is not only that its free, but it finds PDF's on the net! When doing research, true research, not just padding citations on my paper, I can't afford $5 or $10 for every paper that looks like it *might* be interesting. The walled-off, high-priced services are nasty and unusable if you really need to blast into new territory with research. Sounds to me like there's a sour grapes syndrome here, as authors and publishers alike discover that if their articles aren't free, aren't on the web, then they don't get read and they don't get cited.
Google's stuff might as well be publicly available betas, it's the cheapest and most realistic form of testing, and it allows them to ramp up server demand.
Most consumers like me never heard of 'beta' until Google started up. So I assume their meaning is just as good as yours, because popular usage trumps tradition and logic (which is why a generation of students will spell googol google!).
Why restrict beta tests to 'expert-only' invitations? Since people CAN use this service productively, I'm glad they allow access in 'beta' form. And now they've elicited a free list of bugs and features that should be added - and from their supposed competition, no less.
Finally, Google is an advertising company, not a shrink-wrap software company. No doubt they open up public betas because it draws eyeballs, and that just doesn't work for Gale's licensing-based sales model.
Personally, I don't think Academic journals need publishers anymore. Every prof puts their papers online, and universities certainly have enough free resources to offer html articles and links to sources. It's kind of embarrassing that scholars still use regular journals. Just keep them online, and when someone wants it, they'll print it out- a waste of paper, but students just make a zillion copies, anyway.
Here's what kills me: one of the major expenses of a college library are the journal subscriptions (whose prices are rising due to consolidation), and they serve professors, who are the ones who write the journals to begin with!
I'm a grad student in the humanities. I primarily use JSTOR to find articles.
I've only played with Google Scholar a handful of times, but my search results were often heavy on book reviews that merely contained the keywords, as opposed to scholarly articles/books dealing with those keywords.
Again, I have not spend much time learning how to use Google Scholar.
I have never even seen a google press release. It seems that all of the new feature come from geeks who stumble around the web site looking for the new things to post on /. All the hype seems to come from these zealots who think google is incapable of making a mistake or bad product.
I work for Thomson Gale and can assure you that we do not produce "The Web of Science" or "Scopus".
;)
And I haven't even RTFA yet...
Big difference. Google is taking its core technology to a field where it makes sense to use it. This is smart business. Yes, the Scholar is free, but so are their other search tools, Also, there's no reason to believe they're trying to undercut anyone with pricing, as their revenue is ad driven. They also haven't engaged in anything approaching anticompetitive behavior. For example, they don't just blacklist any site indexed with Web of Science.
On the other hand, MS invented a product specifically to go after the competitor it perceived as its biggest threat, a product it had no experience with (browser). It did this solely to kill that competitor. It priced Explorer at $0 when its main products are for-pay, and made no money from it, making it clear that they were pricing Explorer in a predatory manner. They also refused to allow OEMs to bundle computers with Netscape.
In short, MS's decision was driven by the need to take out Netscape, and Google's decision is a natural extension of their business. That's not to say MS couldn't have come out with a browser in a proper manner, or Google couldn't go into Academic searching in a predatory manner. Ultimately it's the way they go about competing that makes them different companies.
Thomson Gale's parent, Thomson, does own Thomson ISI, which produces the Web of Science.
The question is not whether google is good enough but wether the commercial offerings are good enough.
As others point out google scholar is free. Generally commercial solutions aren't and work on subscription basis.
Furthermore google scholar works by basically more or less the same strategies as regular google. Put some search terms in the box and relevant search results will surface. This is a different strategy than the traditional solutions which index many different kinds of metadata and allow for elaborate searches based on that metadata. Both strategies have their place but eventually price and convenience will determine who dominates the market. If simple queries are your thing, google scholar is the preferred search engine. If you are a fussy librarian, you probably need something more sophisticated.
I'm a researcher who is not associated with a research institute and thus has no access to academic search engines, online subscriptions, etc. I do have access to google scholar. If your article shows up there with a download link for the pdf I can read it. Otherwise I have to make an effort to read your article. The way scientific publications work has changed over the past few years. Journal publications give you status, google gives you exposure. Many researchers end up reading my articles after doing a google query, not after consulting a table of contents of some journal. Google is convenient that's why it works so well.
I have a number of different use cases that are typical for me:
- get some useful references on a topic
- look up the correct reference for something you have read
- find stuff written someone you've read other stuff from
- find out who is citing you
All these things google scholar does well. If you are a researcher it is in your interest to make sure google returns relevant search results if people look for your work stuff that is related to your work. Putting your articles on a website is all you need to do.
Jilles
Google is brand new to the world. As a result of just going public (not even a year has past yet!) they have a lot more capital, a deficit in developers, and a virtually infinite playing field (all of Google's machines, databases of random cataloged things.. it's a virtual goldmine for dataminers!).
Gmail is good because AJAX is exactly the statement I would expect from someone trying to spread this opinion. Gmail is good because they took a simple concept, and implemented in a way that's friendly to users, and conducive to web-browsers. No special clients (if you don't want). AJAX is simply the technology that afforded this in a reliable, quick manner. It's like saying "The Saturn V was good because of its engines" or something equivalent; it's not one aspect of it, it's the whole package.
AJAX as a technology has revolutionized the internet, and is probably the primary warring grounds for the next Browser Revolution. Like CSS and Java[ECMA?]script were before it. No more waiting for servers to serve up entire webpages to update a counter. No more clicking a button and going to the next page, praying that your data was correctly posted, and that you won't have to go back and retype it. It is simply a means to an end.
Who cares about a career fair? Microsoft is inheirently going to have more people at their booth because they do more than one thing with their company; Google is primarily in the business of data mining and advertising. Microsoft is in the business of Gaming Systems, Operating Systems, Input devices, Office suites, Imaging applications, hell, you name it and Microsoft has something you could do for them.
It's called Diversification. Google's doing it right now. Microsoft did it ten years ago. IBM as a company has recently shifted towards slimming down the size of their company to be an Open Source Support vendor / processor design company. You're really comparing a Taxi company to Wal*Mart to Kinkos here..
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I've used most of the big academic search engines, and there's one area where google just blows everyone else away: the interface. No one else can hold a candle to the 'type some shit and get what you want back' google scholar search. Yeah, sure, it may be an 'incomplete' database, but what is there is VERY easy to find in my experience. When they've got more stuff indexed, this thing is going to rock. It's already the first place I turn when I need to pull up a citation, and I rarely have to go to one of the 'better' search engines.
I work for Scopus and it is owned by Elsevier, not Thomson Gale. Those links are to reviews of the products, not the products themselves.
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.
As as lawyer having to rely on Lexis on Westlaw (expensive internet legal databases), I find their "search" engine a real pain. I can't imagine how it could be worse. If google would start a competitive database, they could win the whole market in a flash.
...it is a review by Peter Jasco, who is an independent reviewer.
/ index.htm
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~jacso/
We just provide him the space to post his reviews.
As we do for several others...
http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/reference
"Visit gale.com regularly to check out the latest reviews on reference resources by these prominent experts:"
Real sciences don't have to be expliclty labeled as such. Political Science, Creation Science, Social Science and Computer Science are not sciences. Do you ever see anybody jabbering about "Chemistry Science" or "Physics Science?" No!
Science uses repeatable experiments to confirm or deny a hypothesis. Single variables are adjusted so that the effects of each is determined and "cause and effect" is established. The studies that use the name "Science" in their name do not do this.
It's absurd that the grandparent poster believes his opinions regarding scholarly research hold the same clout as an astronomers.
Now the Evil Google Empire will fall because their BETA software isn't ready for prime time. Good thing Microsoft releases such clean beta software. Probably why they are so successful.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Google killed off a few search engines. Google's search engine was significantly better, by pretty much any possible standard.
When was the last time Highwire Press, Scopus, or The Web of Science, got /. coverage? Have any of these ever? Why do we need a special catagory and daily coverager of every tool Google looks at?
Vote for Pedro
Highwire from Stanford looks good but it suffers from the same problem all library search tools have. You misspell a keyword or an author and you get back: "Your search criteria matched zero articles."A database search, where nothing is returned is frustrating. Google has solved this problem.
It has been said before: the review by Thomsom Gale compairs its own product to Google Scholar and can therefore not be taken seriously.
I am a masters student and I am often search technical journals to make sure that I am not duplication research. I have used google scholar and while I see potential, it is sorely lacking. I have used web of science many times for one particular feature. It is called a sited reference search. The idea is to take a article from a journal and find other articles that site it as a reference. This is a very use full way to find article that are related to you area of research.
True.
The only problem with Google scholar is that it points to pay-for-view sites for the articles (such as the ACM, IEEE web sites) even when the authors have posted a copy of the paper on their web pages. But another quick Google (non-Scholar) search and the problem is solved. And anyway, as I work in a university who has access to all kind of sites, this is not really an issue for me.
Thumbs up to Google Scholar!
In the end, it all depends how you use it and what you want it to be. Scifinder Scholar (no relation to the Google service, despite the lawsuit) and Beilstein are probably the two most-used indexes used in chemistry. I'll use Web of Science once in a while, as well. They are all very good at what they do (some annoying twitches of each aside), which is why my University is shelling out lot of money for them. The problem with site-licensed databases is they need an on-campus IP address, which sucks when I'm working in a coffee shop. Google Scholar is nice because I can find citations fairly reliably - I still have to use the web-based VPN to be 'on-campus' to then get the article, but it works.
Be careful of your thoughts; they could become words at any minute...
--while in other news, Microsoft finds Linux highly lacking.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Google Scholar has been around for ages now... Why is this news?
This said, Google Scholar is fairly good when it comes to recent publications. And for researchers who cannot afford WOS or SCOPUS, it can be a life saver.
ok so i'm an academic and i've used lots of these things and i find scholar.google the best, so it isn't so serious as the others and sometimes you get entries that shouldn't really be there and for things like citation counts it isn't accurate but for finding stuff and follow along citatation, well its miles better and miles more straight forward to use.
I believe Google's superior stock valuation will drive these services into Google.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Aren't you guys SICK and TIRED of Google this, Google that, every friggin day?! It's like the /. editors have NOTHING else interesting to talk about. This place is coming off my bookmarks if there isn't more variety in the news reporting.
It seems the editors need to take another look at the "Omelette":
http://slashdot.org/faq/editorial.shtml#ed900
Let me try to give you an analogy for Slashdot's homepage. It's like an omelette: it's a combination of sausage and ham and tomatoes and eggs and more. Over the years, we've figured out what ingredients are best on Slashdot. The ultimate goal is, of course, to create an omelette that I enjoy eating: by 8pm, I want to see a dozen interesting stories on Slashdot. I hope you enjoy them too. I believe that we've grown in size because we share a lot of common interests with our readers. But that doesn't mean that I'm gonna mix an omelette with all sausages, or someday throw away the tomatoes because the green peppers are really fresh.
There are many components to the Slashdot Omelette. Stories about Linux. Tech stories. Science. Legos. Book Reviews. Yes, even Jon Katz. By mixing and matching these things each and every day, we bring you what I call Slashdot. On some days it definitely is better than others, but overall we think it's a tasty little treat and we hope you enjoy eating as much as we enjoy cooking it.
While Google products in general may be overhyped, Scholar is very nice. I have used it for two projects, and also tried citeseer. I haven't tried the others, though I did have access to the ACM Digital Library and IEEE transcripts. In actual searches, scholar.google.com trumped all three of them. I found more papers that were relevant to my topic, most likely because of the full text search. Often, I was looking for a paper that implemented a technique not listed in the abstract but still used in the paper. Why didn't they include search engine results? All competent search engine reviews I have read created a set of search queries and tested the engines based on that.
I do not know about you but usually I use www.scirus.com to search for scientific references. It is a really great place to start.
Also the filetype:pdf google search command is quite handly
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Google Scholar found my papers and those of my wife but Highwire Press failed to do so and the others cost money.
Given that published academic research is mostly paid for by public money a free service like Google's is long overdue.
I personally think that before too long academics will rebel against the tyranny of journal publishers and start their own peer reviewed online journal publication systems.
I'm a researcher in the field of technology and innovation management. IMO, the article either misunderstands or chooses to misrepresent the value proposition of Googgle Scholar.
My area of research is rapidly evolving, yet, it can take two to three years to get a paper published in a leading journal. The academic peer review process takes time.
If I want to search published papers in my field, I use a commercial database, such as INFORM or Business Source Premier. In that way, I can find out what researchers did a few years ago. HOWEVER, if I want to know what people are working on RIGHT NOW, I go to Google Scholar. There, I can find draft working papers, conference papers, papers submitted for review, and even papers that were rejected by journals (possibly for good reason!).
For my needs, Google Scholar currently complements commercial databases; it does not replace them. Given time, however, Google's potential is limitless. Firms that make revenue licensing scientific databases have every reason to feel threatened. Unless they innovate to address the needs of their end-users, they may well be displaced from their market -- and rightly so.
I work for Thomson Scientific (TS). Thomson Gale is also a Thomson company, but we are seperate in many important ways. Gale doesn't really compete with Google. But many TS businesses and products (Delphion, Derwent, MicroPatent, Researchsoft, Web of Knowledge) must compete with Google, or rather, must provide enough added value so that a non-product like Google doesn't seem like a better option.
At non-secret public employee meetings, the CEO of Thomson Scientific and Healthcare (TSH), Bob Cullen, has said that Google is indeed a "disruptive influence" in TS's target markets and that Thomson must be active in assessing and dealing with that influence.
So, it's no wonder that a Thomson company, Thomson Gale, might publish a report that attacks Google, which is a direct threat to the business of another family of Thomson companies, those under the Thomson Scientific banner.
It's a shame, really, since it is such an obvious circle-jerk.
I don't care much for wos'es archive. If an article is 50 years old and it does not get cited then it is probably not worth reading.
That's utterly silly. There are several fields that develope tools of science rather than expand science on their own. In particular, there are the fields of mathematics, statistics, and computer science. You may be unable to appreciate the contribution of computer science to science, but fortunately there are plenty of scientists who don't share your provincial attitude.
Everyone, Thomson Corp views Google as a competitor in this market. It is a very information/education topheavy corporation, and this feature specifically - and all things Google Search, are viewed as competitors from within.
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.
Taking computer science in particular (as it's my field) I think it's quite legitimate to study and attempt to explain the workings of information and call it science, even if most of the empirical experiments would be infeasible without relatively modern equipment. The same is true for progress in almost all natural sciences today. I hardly think that the work of people like Turing and Shannon can be accurately described as just 'providing tools' for other sciences!
In response to the grandparent, I believe your unspoken assumption is flawed: programming!=computer science. Serious computer science, like any serious academic field involves peer-reviewed journals, and plenty of rigorous scholarly research, theorising and experimentation. Saying that computer scientists can't comment on scholarly research because their studies are not like astronomy is absurd. Can historians not comment either?
There are also other real sciences that call themselves something-science. Neuroscience and its cousin cognitive science for example.
I use both Google Scholar and Web of Science extensively in my research. I find both of them very useful. I have free (to me) access to both, and can use either as much as I need. But here's why I find myself using Google Scholar much more often:
Now, Google is not better at everything. Web of Science clearly has much more complete citation listings for the journals it indexes. If I need a detailed literature review, then I always have to use the most complete index. But Google is much more convenient for most purposes, and it includes citations that WoS lacks. They are both tools, and as a scholar I find them both essential, but neither is essential alone, since academic work goes far beyond databases into judging content, knowing arcane references, and finding things that have not been read for years. I find that Google sometimes dredges up new old things, and that is very useful to me.
So in my opinion, Google Scholar is more than ready for prime time. I have been recommending it to my students for months.
--JH
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/
WoS (or Web of Knowledge, as it is now), so soooooo slooooooow. It takes minutes to search for something (if you include the time taken to log in, select which databases to search, etc). Google scholar takes fractions of a second, plus it searches the full text.
If I want to find a referenced article, I can just type in the citation (eg. science 287, 2237 (2000)), and it will find it. Far quicker than finding the journal website, then typing in the volume and page reference.
-BB
Unfortunatelly, the majority of the topics I do research on (second language acquisition and its relation to Universal Grammar, Generative Grammar, and some historical linguistics research as well) lie in several disparate databases (Ebsco, various science related DBs, educationn DBs, anthropological DBs, some psychology related DBs, etc.). Because of this I can do dozens of queries on dozens of databases, or one on Google scholar and go directly to the database that contains what I need.
Plus Google Scholar searches other sites that aren't in the major databases, like theses which are posted to university websites. It was that way that I found an excellent unpublished doctoral thesis from an Italian university which I'm currently using in at least one of my research papers.
For Pete's sake, this service Google's offering just hasn't been out as long as the others have. All the other services looked this bad when they first started out, so damnit, don't whine about it.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
... it shows me what a void there is still to fill!
ISI has had a fantastic run providing bibliometric research tools for nearly 30 years, but only to deep-pocket libraries. WebOfScience finally brought the ISI analysis of academic pubs into 21st century, and so it is no surprise that they quickly bumped into Google, who brought fundamentally the same insight (citation impact/in-degree is a great clue) to the Web. If GoogleScholar has simply nudged Thomson (who bought ISI in 1992) to broaden the market for this tool, that's already progress in my book.
For now, the interesting part to me is a compare/contrast of just what each brings to the party. While this review by Péter Jacsó' (his earlier review is also helpful) is part of Thomson/Gale's site, I think it's unfair to see it simply as a vendor whitepaper; he identifies serious flaws in GoogleScholar. But even with the price differential aside, it must be clear to all that WoS has some serious issues, too! (Some of you might be interested in an author-focused comparison I did recently between GS and WoS: Scientific impact quantity and quality: Analysis of two sources of bibliographic data , arXiv.org preprint arXiv:cs.IR/0504046, 11 Apr 05). Do they really want to hold up the interface to WoS as a virtue?! Checkout the touchgraph browser for CiteSeer as an example of what we can hope for. And while there isn't yet an API to GoogleScholar, screen-scraping at least lets us do some experiments over this corpus; WoS does not seem willing to provide similar access (I've tried:).
These aren't the only two vendors, of course: GoogleScholar was certainly inspired by the CiteSeer (originally at NEC, now at UPenn) project; it continues to be an innovative force. Our local, generally well-stocked library doesn't carry Scopus (too expensive?), but I hear good things about it. Entrez/PubMed has been mentioned and (while it is great in many other dimensions!) I don't see it is as especially relevant until the citation linkages it is beginning to build via PubMedCentral come online. And when the NIH's "Open Access" policy (cf. [Science 11 February 2005; 307: 825 DOI: 10.1126/science.307.5711.825], but not without a subscription:) starts to kick in, and as changing standards regarding exchange of ``open citation'' information (e.g, CrossRef) propagate, the pace of change is bound to accelerate.
Looking a bit farther afield for suggestions of what might be coming, some of you lawyer-types may appreciate what Shepards does for case law searching. They orignally started doing simply the manual "inversion" of citation links that ISI does, but grew into an entirely new source of independent analysis of the arguments connecting the two documents. Imagine how helpful it could be if scientific and web citations carried as much third-party (ie, from neither the cited or citing authors) metadata!