Slashdot Mirror
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."
A typo seen in the first character?! CoyboyNeal, this must be a record!
Oh, and maybe this was a dream, but wasn't Google Scholar launched a long time ago? Nope, wasn't a dream: this entry in the google blog (dated October 18th 2004) announces the launch of the beta version. Although scholar is still in beta, surely it shouldn't be referred to as google's "new" service. This story is also (needless to say) a Dupe.
They should have just cut to the chase and called it Google Homework.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
Thank you for posting this informative information, next would you mind running a story on google maps, google news, and maybe google firefox toolbar?
I can't believe these people are making more money than I am.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
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.
Google Scholar was launched 11/18/04.
Professors don't like it when I use multiple Wikipedia references...
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
The service has been around at least for a year. What exactly has been added to it now?
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.
In related news, Google announced today that they're going to hold their IPO.
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.
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.
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.
Google beta launched! New search engine which promises to organized the world's information neatly. You can find it here.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I think the Slashdot editors/owners should come out and tell us (the paying customers) if this is indeed the case.
"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants."
- Isaac Newton
"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders."
- Hal Abelson
"In computer science, we stand on each other's feet."
- Brian Reid
the REAL news is that Google have just released a search engine!
Anyway, I'm off to try out the new beta of Windows 95...
Dupe or not..It seems Jon Katz's article on slashdot itself is cited.
I'm unable to find stuff published in my field this year with google scholar (including 2 of my papers).
The Raven
Google about Google Scholar to find out when it was released before posting it... remember.. Google Search came out only a week ago, and is still relatively new and can help you find information on the net.
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
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.
i am a soviet space shuttle
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.
Funny how many people in this thread commented on this story without appearing to know that Google Scholar has already been available for ages. Just goes to show that this site main target group is really 13 year old 1337 dudes, as anyone seriously interested in computer science (or, for that matter, any other research subject) uses Google Scholar almost on a daily basis.
And don't even get me started on the editor not knowing about it either...
And when is scholar.google.com going to support exporting to BibTeX-style citations?
Huh? Huh? Huh!?
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
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.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
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.