Re: Google Scholar

From: Heather Morrison <heatherm_at_ELN.BC.CA>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 09:47:51 -0800

With all the emphasis on immediate open access, I'm wondering - how up
to date is google scholar?

A quick search by publication year yields the following:

2001: 62,000 items
2002: 68,600 items
2003: 63,700 items
2004: 8,060 items

While it is possible that 2004 statistics will not be complete due to
publishing delays, this does suggest to me that there is a delay in
google scholar harvesting - whether of open access or
subscription-based resources, or both, is hard to say of course. I do
think this data suggests that if there is one place to look for OA
materials at the moment, it is not google scholar.

My own searching confirms this suspicion - I am finding that if a
needed item is not found in google scholar, then an open access copy
may well still be found through a regular web search.

hope this helps,

Heather Morrison


On 16-Feb-05, at 6:16 AM, Thomas Walker wrote:

> As T.S.Mahadevan recently pointed out on the BOAI Forum, what those
> who are
> searching for open archive and other scholarly literature really want
> is a
> single website where they can search the entire set of such literature.
>
> Google is already accounting for a significant portion of the hits on
> the
> OA journal articles I monitor. Might Google Scholar be that website?
>
> =======
>
> Google Scholar (beta version online at http://scholar.google.com)
> restricts
> Google searches to scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed
> papers,
> theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all
> fields
> of research, and finds articles from a wide variety of academic
> publishers,
> professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as
> well as
> scholarly articles available across the web. Google Scholar ranks
> search
> results by their relevance to the query, so the most useful references
> should appear at the top of the page. 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 automatically analyzes and
> extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the
> documents they refer to are not online. This means that search results
> may
> include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only
> in
> books or other offline publications. [Parts of this description taken
> directly from http://scholar.google.com/scholar/about.html#about.]
>
> =======
>
> Tom Walker
>
>
>
> ============================================
> Thomas J. Walker
> Department of Entomology & Nematology
> PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive)
> University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620
> E-mail: tjw_at_ufl.edu (or tjwalker_at_ifas.ufl.edu)
> FAX: (352)392-0190
> Web: http://tjwalker.ifas.ufl.edu
> ============================================
>
Heather G. Morrison
Project Coordinator
BC Electronic Library Network
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Phone: 604-268-7001
Fax: 604-291-3023
Email: heatherm_at_eln.bc.ca
Web: http://www.eln.bc.ca
Received on Wed Feb 16 2005 - 17:47:51 GMT

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