Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Launches Scholar Beta

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the google-this-google-that dept.

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."

4 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Intriguing. by millennial · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One problem with standing on the shoulders of giants:
    You have to figure out how to climb them first.
    Seriously, though, this seems like what the internet was meant to be, back in "the day." IIRC, the 'net started out as an joint initiative involving the government and several academic institutions as a means of creating a repository of knowledge. I'm glad Google is getting into this game, since they seem to have a pretty solid search method figured out. Besides, it could certainly make researching for my thesis a bit easier.

    --
    I am scientifically inaccurate.
    1. Re:Intriguing. by hazem · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The other thing about the "standing on the shoulders of giants" is that many believe that Newton was being mean-spirited when he said it, rather than visionary in his views of the source of his brilliance.

      "Science: A History 1534-2001" by John Gribbin which suggests that his comment was in fact a barely disguised personal attack. It written in a letter to a scientific competitor, Robert Hooke, who had complained, correctly, that Newton was not giving him proper credit for his discoveries. Newton's response that he had seen further by "standing on the shoulders of Giants" was intended to rule out Hooke, who was famously short and hunchbacked. This is not 100% accepted history but it does seem to fit in with Newton's general demenour and behaviour.

      It's a great saying, nonetheless.

  2. Not ready? by DrEldarion · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This previous article claims that Google Scholar was inferior compared to other services like Highwire. Has it been changed much in the last month, or is it still not as good as it could be?

    Yes, I realize that it's still in "beta", but "beta" may as well mean "v1.0" to google.

  3. Re:homework solved! by hoka · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't see why they should. I've had a significant amount of luck using it before for gathering work for research papers and upper division writing classes (Comp Sci ones that is). I've also used it a bit in my offtime to look for some cool things, though I havn't had much luck in that regard.