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Begin the presentation

Exploring Google Scholar: The Agony and the Ecstasy

Summary

• Google Scholar ("Schoogle") is a powerful and free search engine
• Explore ways to use Google Scholar along with the Library’s more costly tools
• Google Scholar is both agonizing and exciting, and it’s going to get better.

Google Scholar

What is it? How do I use it? What results can I get? What do I do next?

• http://scholar.google.com
  • Beta service
  • "Peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports"
  • Relationship between Google Scholar and "CrossRef Search Pilot" publishers (?)

Google Scholar

• Initial observations:
  • You can get something for almost any search
  • This kind of full-text searching of articles across publishers is relatively rare
  • Google Scholar is generally best for Science & Technology, particularly Computer Science
  • Seems to be missing a lot; hard to know what is missing
  • Often a good place to start
  • Seldom a good place to finish

Google Scholar seems to be a good place to get something relevant for almost any search

What results can I get?

Library book Citation Abstract Full text article PDF Web page Broken link etc.

Comparison

• “children television violence” or “children and television and violence”
  • Google Scholar: “about 14,900”
  • Exp. Acad. ASAP (keyword): 13,925
  • Find It! (all Find It! collections): 3206
  • Scirus: 131,858! (1261 articles)
• Among basic keyword searches, Google’s relevancy is a big plus!

Example no. 2: Books

Basic vs. Advanced search

Generally, Google Scholar is very successful at getting you to a particular document (provided that it is in the database!)

Comparison II

• Science, Jansens, 2002
  • Expanded Academic ASAP was just as successful, but it took a few more steps to get there (keyword search, author name, limit to journal title, dates)
  • Find It! – 11 phantom results, took forever
  • Scirus – had to use Advanced Search, only found PubMed reference, not Science Magazine full text (not Elsevier)

Failures

• Incompleteness and its sub-drawbacks are currently the main problem
  • No scope note
  • Inability to know what isn’t there
    • Google’s algorithm for “scholarly”: ???
    • Example: PubMed
      • Google Scholar gives “about 1,080,000” hits
    • What gets included when a journal is indexed?
      • Major articles?
      • Reviews?
      • Letters to the editor?

More incompleteness

• “Cited By”: Rather bloated results, and obviously incomplete (only “cited by” other Google Scholar documents)
  • Results are bloated  mirror sites for articles
  • Web of Knowledge is more complete
    • But, Google Scholar does include book citations
• Incompleteness of citations
  • Name of journal, year, domain for access
    • Volume and issue information, please?

Failures

• Inconsistency/randomness of results
  • Will I find citations or full-text? Course web sites? Technical reports? Conference proceedings?
• This is common with our other resources (see Expanded Academic ASAP, for example)

Full text

• You will have a lot of seamless full text access if you are on campus
• Realize that full text access comes at a price, and the library has paid for it!
• Don’t pay for something the library already has! Try our e-journals search as well as the Library Catalog!

More drawbacks

Search functionality No controlled vocabulary No sorting Limited search options, even with advanced search

Reminders

• Google Scholar ("Schoogle") is a powerful and free search engine
• Explore ways to use Google Scholar along with the Library’s more costly tools
• Google Scholar is both agonizing and exciting, and it’s going to get better.