CAL2006: The Power and Perils of Google Scholar

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
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