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URL: Google Scholar
Submitted by J.W. Bizzaro; posted on Tuesday, July 26, 2005 (2 comments)

Google has released the beta version of `Google Scholar'. From the website:

``What is Google Scholar? 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.

``How does Google Scholar work? Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This 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 your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.''

URL

http://scholar.google.com

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Google scholar is very hit and miss

Submitted by joshua richardson; posted on Tuesday, August 2, 2005

Google review article again. Sorry about the broken URL in the previous message. http://www.galegroup.com/servlet/HTMLFileServlet?imprint=9999&region=7&fileName=/reference/archive/200412/googlescholar.html

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Google scholar is very hit and miss

Submitted by joshua richardson; posted on Tuesday, August 2, 2005

I have mixed emotion when it comes to using Google scholar. I like the ease with which I'm able to run federated searches and not have to worry about indexing or controlled vocabularies, but in the end I know that my results are highly skewed and incomplete. In its current form, Google Scholar is quick 'n dirty, fast food search at best. For now, I think it's best to use Google Scholar as a way to pick up keywords and concepts, afterwhich, searchers can use WITHIN the databases that Google pulls its content. The best review of Google Scholar I've seen to date comes from <a href="http://www.galegroup.com/servlet/HTMLFileServlet?imprint=9999&region=7&fileName=/reference/archive/200412/googlescholar.html">Peter's Digital Reference Shelf</a>. It does a good job laying out the reasons Google Scholar still needs a lot of work and why users should not rely on it as their only search engine when doing research.

Google scholar is very hit and miss

Submitted by joshua richardson; posted on Tuesday, August 2, 2005