This post courtesy of Anne Taylor-Vaisey: Google Scholar was launched last week, and already there has been a lot of reaction in the press to it.We can expect a lot more over the next few weeks.
From the New York Times:
November 18, 2004
Google Plans New Service for Scientists and Scholars
By JOHN MARKOFF
From the Chronicle of Higher Education
November 19, 2004
Google Unveils a Search Engine Focused on Scholarly Materials
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
CE_Current_Awareness link to these articles: [Yahoo userid & password required]
The following is an excerpt from About Google Scholar [subtitle: Stand on the shoulders of giants]:
- 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.
How it works: Google Scholar orders search results by how relevant they are to your query, and the relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared, and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online.
But does it work?
I have played around in Google Scholar and I must say, this is an amazing search engine. If you do an author search and add a word or two or a phrase, you get some really interesting results. Not only do hits include Web sites and library locations, they include links to citations of hits, like a citation index, but free.
The simplicity of the current Beta search interface is frustrating, but refinements are planned. You can restrict to author, by using author:[last name]. If you add a word or phrase (in quotation marks) you can limit your results somewhat.
Go to the site and try this search:
author:mazmanian continuing education
There are links to PubMed abstracts, journal Web sites, and, in some cases, full text, if available on the Web. The notation [PDF} will sometimes link to full text and sometimes to a password protected page. It is fascinating to follow up on the Cited by 14 notations. It is like a treasure hunt.
Google Scholar is no substitute for sophisticated database searching, but it certainly has great potential as a general search engine aiming for scholarly results. And it is serendipitous, which is always a pleasure.
To comment on this post, click on "comments" below. To receive a weekly update, e-mail Sue.
This post courtesy of Anne Taylor-Vaisey: Google Scholar was launched last week, and already there has been a lot of reaction in the press to it.We can expect a lot more over the next few weeks.
From the New York Times:
November 18, 2004
Google Plans New Service for Scientists and Scholars
By JOHN MARKOFF
From the Chronicle of Higher Education
November 19, 2004
Google Unveils a Search Engine Focused on Scholarly Materials
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
CE_Current_Awareness link to these articles: [Yahoo userid & password required]
The following is an excerpt from About Google Scholar [subtitle: Stand on the shoulders of giants]:
- 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.
How it works: Google Scholar orders search results by how relevant they are to your query, and the relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared, and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online.
But does it work?
I have played around in Google Scholar and I must say, this is an amazing search engine. If you do an author search and add a word or two or a phrase, you get some really interesting results. Not only do hits include Web sites and library locations, they include links to citations of hits, like a citation index, but free.
The simplicity of the current Beta search interface is frustrating, but refinements are planned. You can restrict to author, by using author:[last name]. If you add a word or phrase (in quotation marks) you can limit your results somewhat.
Go to the site and try this search:
author:mazmanian continuing education
There are links to PubMed abstracts, journal Web sites, and, in some cases, full text, if available on the Web. The notation [PDF} will sometimes link to full text and sometimes to a password protected page. It is fascinating to follow up on the Cited by 14 notations. It is like a treasure hunt.
Google Scholar is no substitute for sophisticated database searching, but it certainly has great potential as a general search engine aiming for scholarly results. And it is serendipitous, which is always a pleasure.
To comment on this post, click on "comments" below. To receive a weekly update, e-mail Sue.
