Google Scholar - what more do users need?

Ian WinshipNorthumbria University

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Google’s modest mission

“Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”

(http://www.google.com/corporate/)

(A thought - how do they make it useful?)

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Google Scholar’s aims

“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.”

(http://scholar.google.com/scholar/about.html#about)

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Content

Types journal articles - 29 publishers (Crossref project) preprints - collections, personal Web sites books conference papers abstracts, esp. PubMed, ACM

- all scholarly?Formats HTML, PDF, Postscript

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Major publishers included

American Physical Society Annual Reviews Association for Computing

Machinery BioMed Central Blackwell Publishing BMJ (British Medical

Journal) Publishing Group Cambridge University

Press IEEE Note: no Elsevier

Institute of Physics Publishing

Nature Publishing Group Oxford University Press Springer-Verlag Taylor & Francis University of Chicago

Press John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Coverage/deficiencies

References

G Scholar Google

Blackwells 214000 1.6m

REPeC 394000 1.3m

NIH 2m 15m

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

PubMed problem

MYTH: Google Scholar searches Medline FACT: Google Scholar does not search Medline.

It searches whatever Medline records NLM happened to give Google. We have no idea when NLM gave Google the records. We can't anticipate when the next batch will be delivered and the Google Scholar database updated.

My results showed that Google Scholar failed to retrieve any PubMed content after February-March 2004

(http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_02.html#000283)

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Currency – an example

How current is the indexing?To answer this question we looked at the most

recent issues of nursing journals at the Blackwell’s site. On average, Blackwell nursing journals were indexed on Google Scholar over two-and-a-half months before they show up in CINAHL.

Chuck Hamaker and Brad Spry Google Scholar Serials 18(1), March 2005, 70-72

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Search features

Boolean – default AND; OR phrase author (including author:name) (with variants)

publication (allowing for varied forms) title (including intitle:word) date + -

.

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Advanced search page

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Features needed

Limits – date, publication type… controlled indexing more fields – affiliation, report number… truncation

More content!!

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Results

Search Web for a paper

abstract

PDF>HTMLCitations

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Find in a library (1)

library search

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Find in a library (2)

choose country

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Find in a library (3)

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Problems

multiple sources multiple versions of the same work – preprint,

published paper, local copy… abstract only payment is requested Some Athens access problems reported

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Subject searching

Flammability of flame retardant-containing ABS-CPVC blends

High temperature wear of Nimonic alloys(Scirus: articles+ web)

  GS Zetoc SCI(1981-)

ISI Proc

Scirus others

ABS 2 0 1 0 3+6 Crossfire - 0

Nimonic 22 1 7 3 90+105

Metadex - 29

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Name searching

(Zetoc - Keele as venue or publisher)

  GS Zetoc

SCI(1981-)

ISI Proc

Scirus others

A Sambell

32 45 26 7 au: 0“name”:1+3538

Inspec (author index) - 36

Keele U 5590

378 1069 165 2284+19135

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Citation searching

Citation: Vlasits, T Electronic letters 32(7) 1996, 612-613

Google Scholar

SCI (1981-)

7 10

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

WoS and Google Scholar

Here we analyze 203 publications, collectively cited by more than 4000 other publications. We show surprisingly good agreement between data citation counts provided by the two services. …Cumulatively, ISI discovered 4741 references, GoogleScholar found 4045.

Richard K. BelewScientific impact quantity and quality:Analysis of two

sources of bibliographic dataarXiv:cs.IR/0504036 v1 11 Apr 2005

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Comparative searching

Side-by-Side Native Search Engines vs Google Scholar (Peter Jacso)

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~jacso/scholarly/side-by-side2.htm

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Linking

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Institutional links

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Cool tools

Toolbar bookmarklet Search from the toolbar – for various browsers IngentaConnect highlighter Shows citations in Google Scholar search results which

have full text on IngentaConnect. Run a search and then click on the toolbar link to highlight the IngentaConnect results.

Search IngentaConnect via Google Scholar Highlight words on any web page and click the link, or

enter words into the pop-up box.  The search will be executed on Google but the results will be limited to those available on IngentaConnect.

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

One answer to my question

a free, easy to use, subject based, deep mining metasearch service whereby you can easily find papers, quality websites, books, technical reports, jobs, industry news, standards, eprints, learning resources, patents, etc.(from another USTLG member)

USTLG 21 April 2005 Google Scholar

Some conclusions

Useful - at an appropriate level – eg undergraduate - despite deficiencies. Remember: user needs or wants; exhaustive or sufficient search

Improvement on Google. Users will find it – its easy to use too.

Can help direct users to library databases/journals. Is information finding important now or information

using? What is the librarian’s role? It’s a Beta version - so not finished, so…

Keep watching - it will get better