Some Thoughts about Google Scholar

I was reading through the current issue of Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship and found this excellent article about Google Scholar

Gray, J. E., Hamilton, M. C., Hauser, A., Janz, M. M., Peters, J. P., & Taggart, F. (Summer 2012). Scholarish: Google Scholar and its Value to the Sciences. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship. doi:10.5062/F4MK69T9

Firstly, I should note that all of the authors are graduate students at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University.  I must commend them and Brian Winterman who helped them through the research process.  I was very impressed by the thoroughness of this research on a very timely topic.  I would like to make comments about some of the remarks in this paper and then make some of my own. 

·         The authors stated they tried unsuccessfully to obtain information from Google on inclusion guidelines and methods and approaches of the company.  No information was provided on what sources are crawled for indexing, how citation information is gathered, or what if any business partnerships exist between Google and publishers.  Certainly publishers such as Elsevier, Chemical Abstracts Service, Thomson-Reuters and many others are responsive to librarians who are their customers.  Just what is Google’s motivation for producing Scholar?

·         When I do cited reference searches for faculty, I only use Web of Science, Scopus, and Scifinder Scholar.  Faculty often report that the numbers in Google Scholar are higher.  When they are up for promotion or tenure they “fight” for every cited reference.  We tell them that Google Scholar often includes non peer-reviewed sources which inflate their total.

·         I never mention Google Scholar when teaching classes.  I feel that I must teach students to search the databases that are paid for by NJIT.  I wonder if any libraries cut databases and told their patrons to search Google Scholar.

·         The authors state that Google Scholar uniquely retrieved items served to fill research gaps and demonstrated its value to find information on obscure topics.

·         On the negative side Google Scholar ranks its results using the complex algorithms of a search engine and does not provide a thesaurus or a way to sort the results.

·         The authors provide  a lengthy bibliography or articles that compare Google Scholar to bibliographic databases by commercial publishers.

I highly suggest reading this article especially since it is open access.