Google Scholar - what more do users need?

1. Google Scholar - what more do users need? Ian Winship Northumbria University

2. 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?) Google Scholar

3. 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) Google Scholar

4. 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 Google Scholar

5. 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. Major publishers included Google Scholar

6. Coverage/deficiencies References Google Scholar

7. 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) Google Scholar

8. 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 Google Scholar

9. Search features • Boolean – default AND; OR • phrase • author (including author:name) (with variants) • publication (allowing for varied forms) • title (including intitle:word) • date • + - . Google Scholar

10. Advanced search page Google Scholar

11. Features needed • Limits – date, publication type… • controlled indexing • more fields – affiliation, report number… • truncation • More content!! Google Scholar

12. Results PDF>HTMLCitations Search Web for a paper abstract Google Scholar

13. Find in a library (1) library search Google Scholar

14. Find in a library (2) choose country Google Scholar

15. Find in a library (3) Google Scholar

16. Problems • multiple sources • multiple versions of the same work – preprint, published paper, local copy… • abstract only • payment is requested • Some Athens access problems reported Google Scholar

17. Subject searching • Flammability of flame retardant-containing ABS-CPVC blends • High temperature wear of Nimonic alloys (Scirus: articles+ web) Google Scholar

18. Name searching (Zetoc - Keele as venue or publisher) Google Scholar

19. Citation searching • Citation: Vlasits, T Electronic letters32(7) 1996, 612-613 Google Scholar

20. 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. Belew Scientific impact quantity and quality:Analysis of two sources of bibliographic data arXiv:cs.IR/0504036 v1 11 Apr 2005 Google Scholar

21. Comparative searching • Side-by-Side Native Search Engines vs Google Scholar (Peter Jacso) • http://www2.hawaii.edu/~jacso/scholarly/side-by-side2.htm Google Scholar

22. Linking Google Scholar

23. Institutional links Google Scholar

24. 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. Google Scholar

25. 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) Google Scholar

26. 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 Google Scholar