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

Google Scholar is fine...

[GileadGreene]

Google Scholar is fine for what it sets out to be: Google that restricts its searches to academic content.

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.

Anything else?

[QMO]

Has Google driven anyone out of the market?

(I really don't know)

If yes, did they actually have a truly better product/service?

Re:It's one thing to have all the information

[Mac Degger]

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.