Sue Byerley and Rita Hug, University of Colorado-Colorado Springs
- http://scholar.google.com/
- No one in the audience few they were confortable with GS
- Academics constantly trying to focus on the paid, high-qulaity databases
- GS started late 2004
- Focuses on scholarly material on the Web
- Not clear on how comprehensive GS is
- no source list
- studies have been done
- GS strong in sciences and medicine
- weaker in social sciences
- constantly improving
- lags behind prop databases on currency
- still contains significant number of links to non-scholarly material
- UCCS doing this
- “The breadth and Depth of Google Scholar” [June 2006 article]
- “Cited by” feature
- Libs can integrate their full-text resources via link resolvers
- Demo of diff between Google and GS using “hurricane katrina”
- Google: 6.5mil results
- GS: 3750 results
- Results screen
- all articles
- recent articles
- cited by
- links to local full text if available
- related articles
- abstract link variations
- Web search on related information for particular article
- BL Direct (British Library)
- Perils
- No source list
- Not as current
- Poor treatment of “popular” newspapers
- Not as strong in the humanities
- Some results are hard to decipher / hard to tell what they are
- Strange results
- search on “google scholar”
- 1st result is from 1992
- first good result is about 10 screens down
- Most of the results are links back to GS in other databases
- Can’t do much with the results
- no sorting options
- no subject headings
- no native “send results”
- When to use GS vs. prop databases
- it depends
- what databases do you have
- how much full text you have to back up GS
- Good for interdisciplinary topics
- Has elements of a federated search engine
- Check out “Scholar Preferences”
- Integrate with a third-party citation management program
