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

Just remember.

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

Microsoft loved to put out something that was just good enough, but free to kill off everything else.

Google's advantage?

[mister_llah]

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...

Utterly shocking

[Otterley]

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!

Re:Utterly shocking

[ScytheBlade1]

While you have a definite point, I believe that there may be a tad bit more to it than you make it out to be.

"whose mission is to provide content and research services to academia"

Also from that same page:
"with 2004 revenues from continuing operations of $8.10 billion"


You think...that's it's possible...that this company is doing it RIGHT? That it's possible that they know what they're talking about?

I'm not claiming to know the answer. I don't use either service, but after reading your post, the obvious jumped out...

Of course they're an apparent competitor. I just have this feeling, though, that they may actually know what they're doing. It's possible that you're right, it's possible that you're wrong, it's just that I don't see evidence as to either for a post like yours to hit +5 Insightful (which it is) without some counter-balance to it.

If their entire goal is to provide a similar service, and they've made $8.10 billion....something tells me that they're doing something right, which may actually give base to their claims.

Astronomy

[v@mp]

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.

Repository != Search Service

[Peter_Pork]

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.

Re:beta

[DrEldarion]

I'm under the impression that everything they release will be in perpetual beta in order to be able to dodge any issues using that as an excuse.

TFA misses the point

[jeremymiles]

I use Google Scholar and Web of Science on a pretty regular basis - I'm not familiar with Scopus, so I can't comment on that. TFA doesn't mention Pubmed either, which is free.

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).