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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."
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
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.
Professors don't like it when I use multiple Wikipedia references...
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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.
Americans win independence!
Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday July 23, @12:53PM
from the take-that-British dept.
GWashington writes ";Finally, after too many battles to count, we have won our independence." What does this mean for our privacy? Will the new government be too invasive?
"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
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!