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

OMG!

[Anonymous Coward]

An article critical of google! I think my transmission link from my brain to slashdot groupthink just fused.

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!

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?!

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.

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.

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).