Google scholar

Google scholar introduced searching for
legal opinions and cases in 2010

To browse other articles on a range of HSL topics, see the wiki index.

Introduction

http://scholar.google.com

Is Google Scholar For You?

If you’re the type of student who feels searching is a drag, Google scholar may be the right search tool for you. While it claims to index everything on the web from peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports in many areas of research, it offers only some of what you might expect from a library database. The convenience of the one-box-fits-all-interface is very compelling for students. What’s really promising is for the first time, Google spiders have crawled into password-protected subscription-based content to provide abstracts of hitherto uncrawled academic material. When spidering content, Google crawlers identify authors of papers and formal titles of papers and other documents. As far as citations are concerned, they are inputs to the special ranking algorithm at Google which establishes the popularity and links between two otherwise disconnected articles. GS has hit a kind of sweet spot for research and students and faculty the world over are please to find new materials but also to see previously unexposed materials. Google is no longer simply indexing the web, it is also adding content (vast amounts of it) as well.

• Why Google when you can use Google Scholar? YouTube video
• Is Summon the search solution we want it to be? March 2011
• Google Scholar - What is it?

Introduction

See also Google Books, Google 2.0 Workshops and Search engines

Many years after its beta release and heated debates among librarians about its usefulness, Google scholar (GS) continues to be viewed as controversial search tool within the academic community. In 2011, its ease-of-access and simple interface have continued to make it a popular choice among students and academics alike. So, why is it so popular? For one, the interface is familiar, classic Google. GS also links to several million Google Books and hard to find items in mainstream tools. Its total size is probably nearing one (1) billion documents, making it the largest search tool ever conceived for scholarly journal searching.

GS is useful for locating peer-reviewed journal content and grey literature produced by government and other agencies. GS now includes Elsevier journals, JSTOR and many other publishers in its database. GS is comparable to CiteSeer and has much of the content of other open search tools (and then some). GS points to more websites, journals and languages than any of its competitors; as such, it is ideal for browsing or pre-searching. Its tagline - "Stand on the shoulders of giants" - is a nod to scientists who have contributed to the scholarly literature. American LIS professor, Peter Jacso, is the most cited academic writing about Google scholar.

In June 2010, Anurag Acharya created the Google scholar blog and wrote his first post.

Search features

GS provides easy searchability in classic Google fashion -- pop in a few keywords and start browsing. GS locates born digital content and points to articles online and on library shelves (see library links). Its "All versions" feature provides access to free-fee fulltext (preprints and early drafts) and its handy "Cited by" feature links to articles that cite the one being viewed. "Related articles" presents lists of closely-related articles and ranks them. In response to the release of Academic Search, an importing feature was included for RefWorks, Reference Manager, EndNote, and BibTeX in 2007 (see citing). GS has a pull-down menu in the search display to limit searches to a given range of years. In 2010, U.S. legal opinions and cases were made searchable by clicking the appropriate radio buttons on the front page; e-mail alerts are now available from the results display.

Pluses & minuses

Google scholar recently enabled its own e-alerting feature for articles added to the database

• same search operators and "limits" as in Mother Google (see Google commands)
• easy to search for academic journals and grey literature
• as of 2010, patents, legal opinions and law journals are searchable; e-mail alerts can be set up
• some papers are only available to subscribers (unless open access)
• citations are determined to be scholarly by Google (not by scholars or librarians)
• total # of journals and coverage is unknown; many scholarly journals are not indexed
• cannot do proper, structured literature reviews because there is no "history"
• more coverage in sciences than humanities
• older material ranked higher, usually
• "Cited by" (citation searching) is useful but numbers may be inflated compared to Scopus or Web of Science
• sorting, browsing and exporting all citations at the same time are not available

Searching for Canadian content

• You cannot easily limit your searching in Google scholar to Canadian materials. By using the site:ca command to limit results to Canadian sites means that relevant results may be missed.
• A second way to retrieve Canadian articles is by using the journal name to limit results. In Advanced Search, add can OR canada OR canadian to the publication box. Unfortunately, this search will return not just journal articles but other materials too. Results will omit any Canadian articles that do not have “Canada” or “Canadian” in their name, as well as articles where Canadian is abbreviated (e.g. CBLJ).
• When searching for articles from within subject areas, limit your searches to specific journals. Ensure you include all ways that the journal might be cited. Google does not allow you to truncate search terms.
• The 'intitle: operator limits to “Canada” or “Canadian” in the title (e.g. intitle:canada OR intitle:canadian) and is not recommended. Although scholarly material in Google Scholar is international, there is a U.S. bias but there are enough Canadian resources to make it worthwhile.

Quality, content

Some searchers consider GS of comparable value to commercial databases despite remaining in beta, and others say it is hampered by poor design and quality control. When searching for items based on publication dates, for example, results are inflated and unreliable; other features such as the citation tracking numbers are also inflated. The number of articles found in some searches increases instead of decreases when limiting to year ranges (ie. 2000-2006). Some critics say that GS has a counterintuitive presentation of results. One problem is the secrecy about GS' coverage and its refusal to publish what journals it crawls. It is impossible to know how current or exhaustive your searches are by using GS. That said, GS finds favour with undergraduates who need a few good articles and who want searching to be on the open web - and simple.

User-friendly as a browsing tool

GS is an ideal vehicle for browsing the academic side of the web. Several librarians have studied its potential as a research tool with the general conclusion that it cannot compete with the power and flexibility of other interfaces. Some librarians ask what content can be retrieved from GS but Google has never released this information to the library community - thus, librarians are left to make educated guesses about its coverage. The consensus seems to be that GS is not as current or comprehensive as some tools but offers a quick way to do interdisciplinary searching. Being aware of its strengths and weaknesses and advanced search capabilities will help to recommend it to users strategically.

Search basics

Google scholar results display

• Step I: type in http://scholar.google.com
• Step II: Enter two specific words describing what you want to find: hit search
• Step III: browse' results
  • Enter up to 32 words (used to be 10).
  • Remember default operator is AND e.g. heart failure retrieves both heart and failure (no need to type AND).
  • type in "heart failure" to force a phrase search
  • Use OR to find related or synonymous terms
  • e.g. surgery AND dental OR dentistry OR dentist
  • Exclude words causing problems with a minus sign e.g. clinton hospital -president
  • Add terms to searches e.g. clinton hospital umass OR massachusetts
  • Results based on terms, then ranks them according to:
    • word frequency (how many times query words appear in each document),
    • word order (first terms in query are given greater weight),
    • word proximity (how close terms are to each other),
    • word location (e.g. in title or heading)
    • PageRank (Google's link popularity algorithm based on how many other pages link to this one similar to cited reference searching) among other complex statistical algorithms.

References

See exhaustive Google scholar bibliography ~130 articles as of 2011

• Banks MA. The excitement of Google Scholar, the worry of Google Print. Biomed Digit Libr. 2005 Mar 22;2(1):2.
• Burright M. Google Scholar: science & technology. Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship 2006 Winter.
• Conference by John J. Regazzi. The battle for mindshare: a battle beyond access and retrieval. from Elsevier.
• Gardner S, Eng S. Gaga over Google? Scholar in the social sciences. Library Hi Tech News 2005;22(8):42–5.
• Giles J. Science in the web age: start your engines. Nature 2005 Dec 1;438:554-5.
• Giustini D, Barsky E. A look at Google Scholar, PubMed, and Scirus: comparisons and recommendations. Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association 2005;26(3):85–9.
• Henderson J. Google Scholar: a source for clinicians? CMAJ 2005 Jun 7;172(12):1549–50.
• Jacsó P. The pros and cons of computing the h-index using Google Scholar for F. W. Lancaster. Online Information Review 2008;32(3):437-452.
• Jacsó P. Testing the calculation of a realistic h-index in Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. Library Trends Spring 2008;56(4):784-815.
• Jacso P. Google scholar revisited. Online Info Rev 2008 32(1): 102-114
• Jacso, P. Google Scholar (Redux). Peter’s Digital Reference Shelf. 2005a June
• Jacsó P. Google Scholar: the pros and the cons. Online Info Rev 2005;29(2):208–14.
• Jacsó P. As we may search – comparison of major features of the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar citation-based and citation-enhanced databases. Current Science 2005 Nov 10;89(9):1537-47.
• Jacso P. Comparison and analysis of the citedness scores in Web of Science and Google Scholar. Lec Notes Comp Sci 2005c 3815:360-9.
• Jacso, P. Google Scholar and The Scientist (October 2005)
• Jacso P. Savvy searching - Google Scholar: The pros and the cons. Online Information Review, 29.2(2005): 208-214.
• Matthew EF, Eleni IP, George AM, Georgios P. Comparison of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar: strengths and weaknesses. FASEB 2008;22:338-42.
• Mayr P, and Walter A. An exploratory study of Google Scholar. E-Prints in Library and Information Science 2007 Aug 21.
• Mullen LB, Hartman KA. Google Scholar and the library Web site: the early response by ARL libraries. College and Research Libraries 2006 Mar;67(2):106–22.
• Nature. Google nouveau. 2004 November 24.
• Neuhaus E, Neuhaus C, Asher A, Wrede C. The depth and breadth of Google Scholar: an empirical study. Libraries and the Academy 2006;(2):127–41.
• Notess GR. Scholarly Web searching: Google Scholar and Scirus. Online 2005;29(4):39–41.
• Pomerantz J. Google Scholar and 100% availability of information. Information Technology and Libraries 2006 Oct 19;25(1):52-6.
• Ripple AS. Expert googling: best practices and advanced strategies for using Google in health sciences libraries. Med Ref Serv Q. 2006 Summer;25(2):97-107.
• Sadeh T. Google Scholar versus metasearch systems. High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine 2006 Feb;12.
• Schroeder R. Pointing users toward citation searching: using Google Scholar and Web of Science. Libraries and the Academy 2007;7(2):243-8.
• Shultz M. Comparing test searches in PubMed and Google Scholar. Journal of the Medical Library Association 2007 October;95(4):442–5.
• Vine R. Google Scholar. Journal of the Medical Library Association 2006 Jan;94(1):97–9.