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."

Comments

Research edge

[fugginsuds]

Does it not bother anyone but me that this will give Google a monstrous research edge, as they will be able to determine trend data, as well as searches that have no results, meaning items that have not yet been researched or published. I find this extremely disturbing that a company can do that.

Re:Research edge

[834r9394557r011]

oohh nooo, they may be able to find out what needs to be learned. Wouldn't you think its better to find out sooner about something that needs to be reaserched and understood, to have more time to reaserch it. well not more time really, but just being able to find out about it now rather than in two years is great. that means we reap the benefits of it sooner.

Is it not been live for months already?

[jberends]

I have been using this service for over half a year now, as long as it is integrated in my Firefox toolbar (The way I found out). What is the fuzz about it? Why is it on /.? Actually is it really helpfull to find the 'meaningfull' papers (# of citations) in most subjects as a starting point for research. But it cannot beat to search through, and compare references of papers in a subject.

Re:Neat.

[MyLongNickName]

Many wiki articles cite the sources they use. Why not refer to the original instead of wiki? Often those sources will give you much more information than the wiki.

Re:Not ready?

[cdills]

This has been discussed at length before, but the determination of the /. crowd was that though Scholar and things like Highwire profess to "do the same thing", they don't.

Highwire allows you to search for articles in catagories, published on certain dates, regarding certain topics. It's a classic database search engine, where the database contains simple information about articles. Scholar is a FULL TEXT search engine.

If you want to find all the articles that relate to Penguin migration patterns, use Highwire.

If you want to find a good example of where someone uses the XYZ method to support thier paper and you don't care about the subject, use Scholar.

They are both tools, and should only be viewed as such.

Re:homework solved!

[Buran]

I'd like to see your average grade school or college kid make use of the sort of thing Google Scholar is aimed at. This is high-level research paper work it's aimed at (many of its results are papers from scholarly journals) and while "homework" may occasionally refer them, I'd say that's a little out of the "homework" league ...

Re:Follow the money.

[Buran]

I can't read a lot of the links from home but can if I'm on campus, which has a sitewide read license for many journals. I think Google Scholar is meant for researchers' use (like my lab's) more than it is the general public.

it IS annoying, however. Take a look at the Public Library of Science http://www.plos.org/ for an organization that believes in open access for everyone. I'm hoping that takes off.

Re:Is their a reason that this is new?

[Radak]

Is their a reason that this is new? Because back in January I used it to do research for a paper.

Obviously not an English paper.

Proper citations

[roffe]

And when is scholar.google.com going to support exporting to BibTeX-style citations?

Huh? Huh? Huh!?

*or the user

[mbius]

Try Franz Kafka. I'm guessing anything done by a guy named Kafka in the last fifty years, hence relevant to current research, is not what you're looking for. The priority is to serve the bleeding edge and worry about history eventually.

It's really great for science, simply for transparent navigation. The convenience over the library system (search title, select journal, login, find year, find volume, find article) or existing frontends (login, select author/title/keyword, worry about syntax, hope what you want is in the DB) isn't brain surgery. But it's quite nice.

There's about a 25-year availability sweet spot between "too old to have been digitized yet" and "recent enough the publisher is still ekeing profits out of a subscription model." Any impetus for improvement to belongs to copyright holders. Their fees come from schools, and recent years have seen their own microcosm of BS from certain money-grubbing weasels.

The short version is that libraries' print catalogues just shrank because Elsevier decided to price-gouge; generic numbers are $1M at x% of total journals = 10x% of journal budget. The contract says anything you cancel makes everything you keep cost more.

It's a tempest in a teacup, but so was the price of a CD in 1995.