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.