Schoogle
All things Google are news. And so also, was the release of Google Scholar in late 2004. The goal, according to Anurag Acharya- the engineer behind the idea, “is to allow and enable users to search over scholarly content." Google scholar made visible a lot of the “invisible” content hidden behind the “veiled curtains of subscription”. You would still require a subscription to read the whole article, but the article’s existence would be visible. To show up on Google Scholar, Google maintains all you have to do is contact their office and then their spider’s crawl through your website. But sites must provide access for non-subscribers to bibliographic citations and abstracts even for non-subscribers. This way a search using last name can also be done in the format :
author:lastname + (title terms) .
And how does Google rank its results?
According to the official About Google Scholar page, Google Scholars ranks its articles based on the content of the article, the journal it appears in and the number of times the article is cited in scholarly literature. And the main grouse the critics have against Google Scholar is regarding their definition of “scholarly literature”. The list of providers and how exactly the ranking is done is not very clear. Serious research still depends more on sites like WebOfScience. As Google becomes BIG and expands its areas of service, Google bashing is emerging as a new fad to replace chants of “Google is God”. There are discussions on how Google might be spreading itself too thin. The literature analyzing Google Scholar too has been more on the critical side. This includes critiques by university libraries like this one http://web.library.emory.edu/services/ressvcs/howguides/googlescholar.html.
For me, Google Scholar remains the easiest way of searching and procuring (since it got connected with the University’s library holdings) scholarly articles on the Internet. I guess I am still addicted to the ways of Google (aren't we all :) )
If you still can not decide whether to use Google Scholar or a specialized electronic journal like Communication and Mass Media Complete, here’s a comparison of Google Scholar with Psych Info found on the UCLA website à
http://www2.library.ucla.edu/googlescholar/results.cfm
author:lastname + (title terms) .
And how does Google rank its results?
According to the official About Google Scholar page, Google Scholars ranks its articles based on the content of the article, the journal it appears in and the number of times the article is cited in scholarly literature. And the main grouse the critics have against Google Scholar is regarding their definition of “scholarly literature”. The list of providers and how exactly the ranking is done is not very clear. Serious research still depends more on sites like WebOfScience. As Google becomes BIG and expands its areas of service, Google bashing is emerging as a new fad to replace chants of “Google is God”. There are discussions on how Google might be spreading itself too thin. The literature analyzing Google Scholar too has been more on the critical side. This includes critiques by university libraries like this one http://web.library.emory.edu/services/ressvcs/howguides/googlescholar.html.
For me, Google Scholar remains the easiest way of searching and procuring (since it got connected with the University’s library holdings) scholarly articles on the Internet. I guess I am still addicted to the ways of Google (aren't we all :) )
If you still can not decide whether to use Google Scholar or a specialized electronic journal like Communication and Mass Media Complete, here’s a comparison of Google Scholar with Psych Info found on the UCLA website à
http://www2.library.ucla.edu/googlescholar/results.cfm
posted by Shefali | 9:32 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home