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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?"
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.
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.
You're right. They should have scholar.google.com locked up in a testlab, accessible only to google employees. until they iron out ALL the bugs. That's far better than to let all acedemia use it right now for the benefit they could recieve using it.
As should be obvious, I think you're nuts. I've used google scholar for projects at uni for a while now, and it has been quite usefull. It could be better (direct display of homonyms...you never know what jargon scientists will use for the same bloody phenomenon), but it's usefull in it's current state. I'm far happier being able to use it now. If they want to call it beta, fine for them.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
It's not that the Gale group is a competitor, they're just not the target group for Google Scholar. They're and industry group. Scoopus and WoS are expensive products which are sold to libraries...and guess who makes the purchasing decissions in those places? Librarians!
The librarians (and other experienced researchers, to be fair) expect the advanced searching functionality that these services provide. They're willing to pay for it and hope that their students will use it.
Google Scholar is aimed much lower, it's probably most useful to students who've never taken the time to learn proper searching techniques in a database system. They expect everything to work like google, one search box and you get your answers.
Despite that fact that librarians buy these services so that students will have better resources most students will never learn how to use them.
The article is right, the expensive services have much more advanced features for advanced users, but most users of those systems will never use a Serial Source list or Thesaurus or Author list. They'll never miss it
Slightly OT: It's my believe that you will get more citations if you publish in the more open journals, so I always prefer that.
It is not just your belief, it is well established:
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/
I think that as academia continues to pull its collective head out of its ass, and realizes that it does not need to pay for a multi-billion dollar publishing industry that gives nothing back (authors write for free, reviewers review for free, editors edit for free, yet my institution spends more than $200k per year on journal subscriptions), services like Google Scholar which revolve around open Internet publishing will become more and more important.
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!
And, having used both Google Scholar and Web of Science, I can say that they're roughly equal in terms of quality. WoS is definitely not a great program. I've had situations where I was able to provide an author's exact name, the name of the journal, and a relatively narrow time period, and it was unable to find an article that I *knew* my school has access to. Of all of the various tools that I've used, none of them are really where they ought to be, and most of them are much more expensive than they should be, given the quality of the product.
Have you heard of Connotea? You can grab bibliographical info from Pubmed, HubMed, and many other indices directly into your Connotea list, and output in .RIS, so you can import into RefMan or whatever. The eventual goal is to move totally away from Thompson ISI and their crufty old products, but until someone comes out with a Journal Style formatting package, we're stuck with RefMan's heinous old interface, at least for now.
So if you click through any search result, you can grab the citation info, and then pass that on to EndNote or whatever, but hopefully we'll soon not even need to do that. Give Connotea a try, you may find it more useful for at least making the list.
What I'd like to see is better cooperation with dx.doi.org and more OpenURL support, but I guess that is mostly up to the libraries. I'm going to try to talk my school into registering their resolver with Google, so it knows which library I get my access from, and hopefully Open Access continues to spread.
Since it's really all about the interface, now we need good forward and backward citation navigation. Tree based approaches, like the one they use at Hubmed, is nice, but the implementation is still a little rough. I would think Google, with their AJAX skillz, could do something much nicer, ala Google Maps.