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Google Launches Scholar Beta
Jaidev writes "'Stand on the shoulders of giants' is what Google claims its new service allows you to do. Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."
Google Scholar was launched 11/18/04.
The service has been around at least for a year. What exactly has been added to it now?
This service has been out for a long time, but dupe aside, it is a very useful site. Academically, it allows you to search journal articles without having to sift through all of the other junk generated with a standard Google search. I am a big fan of this site and I use it quite often.
Voice your opinion!
I just used Scholar this morning looking for an abstract from the American Society of Criminology's "CRIMINOLOGY & Public Policy" journal.
c jrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/grants/207824.pdf
The original abstract:
"Trajectories of Crime at Places: A Longitudinal Study of Street Segments in the City of Seattle"
Criminology & Public Policy, American Society of Criminology
Vol. 42 (2), May 2004, pp.283-322.
David Weisburd, Shawn Bushway, Cynthia Lum, Sue-Ming Yang
Yielded this from Google Scholar:
THE CRIMINAL CAREERS OF PLACES: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY
http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://www.n
David Weisburd, Ph.D. Principal Investigator University of Maryland, College Park & The Hebrew University, Jerusalem Cynthia Lum, Ph.D. Project Director Northeastern University, Boston Sue-Ming Yang, M.A. Research Assistant University of Maryland, College Park
July 31, 2004
National Institute of Justice, DOJ
A subsequent NIJ grant funded report based on the abstract I was looking for.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/15/144723 2&from=rss Google Scholar sucks because it can't count accurately, and it does a crappy job of searching by date, and it doesn't consider variations on names.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/11/19 24254&tid=217&tid=123&tid=146 The American Chemical Society (maker of SciFinder Scholar) sues Google over Google Scholar.
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/11/18/1317241.shtm l?tid=217&tid=188 Google Scholar. It exists.
Sounds to me like that last one makes this story a dupe, unless Google Scholar has gone from release back to beta in the meantime. Given the first article, that may be the case.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
I'm unable to find stuff published in my field this year with google scholar (including 2 of my papers).
The Raven
This still doesn't hold a candle to a good university library site. Finding good academic articles is still all about context context context. You need to know what journals you want, what authors aren't crackpots, etc ec. My own university's library system (U of Minnesota), www.lib.umn.edu, has great research guides to help provide that context.
As an example, A Google Scholar search for Kafka doens't have the sort of literary references I'm looking for until the third page. Is it just that scientific articles are more likely the be available on the web?
One very good thing about Google Scholar is that it specifically searches references. This is an advance, and further work on the engine should be in this direction (I'm thinking a visual web of articles). The first thing you do when you find a halfway decent article is check out its references and then go and grab those, *especially* if more than one article references something. It's often hard to know what the really important watershed articles and books are in a given subject when you're new to it (again with the context). A quick, visual chart or web of articles and the articles they reference would be awesome for figuring that out. Something like their score for web pages but based solely on references. This is already how it works (hits are sorted by the number of articles that have cited them), but it sure would be nice to be able to, say, check articles that fit your search genre and uncheck those that don't. I could then uncheck the scientific articles and watch the literary ones move up on my search.
Rambling now. Done now
Nah, CiteSeer is still THE resource for Computer Science related papers. And it's sponsored (in part) my Microsoft Research (where has NEC gone?). So we have a nice healthy competition going on. yay!
I am google schoolar + PubMed addict, so my opinion is not objective at all.
Google schoolar pros:
* full text search,
* save a lot of time because it shows a few lines of text surrounding your query,
* articles at the top have highest number of citations, so I know what is popular/respected publication,
* in advanced search I can select publications from the last year(s) with not so many citations,
* each publication has a link listing who cite this publication (some journals do not provide such a list),
cons:
* If your query words are common, there is very little you can do to narrow the search results,
* areas that are not publication-driven (computer science?) does not cite others so often and are not well organized by google scholar (in contrast for example to life sciences),
* if you do not know what are you looking for, then google scholar is not good for you,
* if you like (or have time) to read the whole papers (instead of just interesting parts) probably you shoud go to the library, not Internet.
etc.
Note also that the content is different. Google Scholar tries to include as many sources as possible, whereas Highwire's portal AFAIK searches only those journals hosted by Highwire Press.
By pointing this out I don't mean to denigrate Highwire. Rather, they publish a lot of journals that are important (to me) and they do a really good job of making online journals easy to use, unlike some other publishers. However, I, along with most biomedical types, almost always start my searches with PubMed. And the (not free) Web of Science is very useful at times too.