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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?"
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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
... oops :)
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The others are expensive curated services, and are hardly playing in the same league as the free services.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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/
Most universities have web of science (which indeed is a better product). This means that most users (=scientists) have access to it anyway. Tor
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:
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
...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:"
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.
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