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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?"
overhyped
overhyped? I dont recall ever hearing of it. of course I havn't heard of the others either..
"What does slashdotting mean?"
"You've never heard of slashdot?"
"I know it makes websites not work."
But it's still in Beta! Google would never release a service without taking it out of Beta first, of course.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
...isn't this still in alpha or beta stage? Give'em a break, already.
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I can't get enough google articles. Give me more!
An article critical of google! I think my transmission link from my brain to slashdot groupthink just fused.
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Neck_of_the_Woods
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At least for now...
IT'S FREE!
[looking at the other options, they are NOT free]
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I'd say in that regard, Google is way ahead...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
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!
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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Overhyped? Google?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
It's entirely another to organize it in a way that is meaningful to those attempting to access it.
The beta argument doesn't wash with me. Virtually everything Google is doing today is beta. It's a cutesy way to hide behind any mistakes in a production service, because you can always say, "whoops! well, remember, it's only beta!"
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Google is guilty of a bit of overconfidence, maybe, in expanding into areas they know little about, but I think Google Scholar is why there is a Google.
Google's founders were academics. Their focus is on creating ways to find information. Finding academic information ought to be their pet project.
The kicker is that if someone else does it better, Google will just buy them.
sigs, as if you care.
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.
Censorship rests on the child's delusion that "If I shut my eyes so I can't see it, it isn't there".
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.
That business about "otherwise very intelligent people have succumbed to stupidity by using Google Scholar to the exclusion of the other, much better services" sounds like the author has a personal or financial stake in WoS or Scopus. Or just a chip on his shoulder, axe to grind, whatever. Either way, the reviewer comes off sounding like an pompous asshole.
If you use Google Scholar and get what you need, then at least you didn't pay anything for the privilege. If they were charging money and it sucked, yeah, I could see someone whining about it. But for free?
-B
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Two reasons: a) The services to which they are comparing Google Scholar are extremely expensive. It is like comparing free TV to a movie you pay see in the theater, and getting all bent out of shape because TV has commercials and isn't in widescreen. Well, duh. b) The reviewer is obviously biased. This is not a review, it is marketing for the other services that are "superior" to Google Scholar. You can see this kind of stuff on pretty much any product site. But that other crap isn't on the front page of /. being touted as a "review".
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).
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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.
Or maybe it really is in beta?
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
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:
Google advantage is not only that its free, but it finds PDF's on the net! When doing research, true research, not just padding citations on my paper, I can't afford $5 or $10 for every paper that looks like it *might* be interesting. The walled-off, high-priced services are nasty and unusable if you really need to blast into new territory with research. Sounds to me like there's a sour grapes syndrome here, as authors and publishers alike discover that if their articles aren't free, aren't on the web, then they don't get read and they don't get cited.
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!
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
I've used most of the big academic search engines, and there's one area where google just blows everyone else away: the interface. No one else can hold a candle to the 'type some shit and get what you want back' google scholar search. Yeah, sure, it may be an 'incomplete' database, but what is there is VERY easy to find in my experience. When they've got more stuff indexed, this thing is going to rock. It's already the first place I turn when I need to pull up a citation, and I rarely have to go to one of the 'better' search engines.
As as lawyer having to rely on Lexis on Westlaw (expensive internet legal databases), I find their "search" engine a real pain. I can't imagine how it could be worse. If google would start a competitive database, they could win the whole market in a flash.
...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.
Be careful of your thoughts; they could become words at any minute...
Last I checked, all the same search engines I used to use still exist: Altavista, Lycos, WebCrawler, Hotbot, Yahoo, AskJeeves. If you're talking about some obscure engine that doesn't exist anymore I hardly blame Google for that since they never made it out of obscurity.
Granted, Google is my (and most people's) primary search engine because it is most accurate most often and is very fast with lots of nice tools (site:, cache:, etc.).
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.