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?"

Comments

JESUS CHRIST OF COURSE

[hoborocks]

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?!

Re:Google's advantage?

[Otter]

HighWire is free, although the articles it links to may not be. (This is an advantage over Google, not a disadvantage.)

The others are expensive curated services, and are hardly playing in the same league as the free services.

Of course they trash their competition

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

wrong question

[jilles]

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.