Information about Google Scholar

In November 2004, Google introduced Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/), a new search tool for academic content (currently in beta form) that enables users to search for scholarly material across a wide spectrum of sources. Search results include online articles, some of them full-text, as well as citations of books, journal articles, technical reports, and other offline publications. One of the main advantages of Google Scholar is the fact that certain publishers have granted Google’s search spiders access to material that has never been spidered before.

In a number of ways, Google Scholar is simply a subset of the main Google index – and it has significant gaps and limitations. The service does point the way to many full-text resources, but a significant number of these require subscriptions or charge per article for access. In many cases, these sources are available in full-text via the library’s database subscriptions.

There are a number of important caveats to keep in mind when considering the use of Google Scholar:

Not all information contained in Google Scholar is necessarily “scholarly” in a traditional sense. For its part, Google offers no definition as to what it regards as “scholarly,” and most searches will result in some number of hits (some of them redundant) that some academics would not consider scholarly at all. In the same vein, Google does not offer full disclosure of the publishers and sources it has worked with in creating Google Scholar. Besides published material, some material in Google Scholar is taken directly from the open web and open access abstracting/indexing databases, and Google does not disclose its method of including and excluding such open web content.

There are significant gaps in the data Google Scholar does cover. Only a subset of data in many of the undisclosed digital archives is actually accessible through Google Scholar. Large HTML and PDF pages themselves may not be fully indexed. It is almost impossible to determine whether (and to what extent) a given publisher’s archive is included.

Google does not disclose the details of its Google Scholar ranking algorithm, except to say that it “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.” Basically, Google determines the relative importance of scholarly material without defining “scholarly” and without revealing how its ranking algorithm determines the relative importance of that material. We also do not know how often new content is added to Google Scholar.

Google Scholar is still a very basic search tool; at the present time, it consists largely of a keyword search function and does not allow for very much customization or limiting of searches.

The service as it currently exists is much better at generating results for science and technology searches than for arts, social sciences, and humanities searches. Comparatively more science articles are being made available for free on the web, and keyword search terms tend to be more specific for scientific topics.

Google Scholar will oftentimes point you to a full-text resource that cannot be accessed without a subscription or payment of some kind. In many cases, the library may provide full-text access to that source in one of our subscription databases, but Google Scholar provides no direct way to get to that source. If students are unaware of this fact or do not take the time to search our subscription databases for the source, they may do without or actually pay for access they could have obtained freely through the library.

Obviously, there are positives and negatives regarding the use of Google Scholar for academic research. One danger is that some students will adopt a “Google Scholar or nothing” approach to research and thus fail to make use of existing library resources and traditional research methods. Since Google Scholar searches generally return a much higher number of hits than traditional searches of library databases, it takes time to determine what is relevant and what is not. On the positive side, Google Scholar can point you to offline as well as online sources and citations. Not only are citations used to some degree in determining the ranking of search results, each hit contains a citation link which lists sources citing that particular book or article.

In the end, the launch of Google Scholar provides researchers with another useful tool for locating scholarly information online. It should be seen as a valuable supplement but certainly not a substitute to traditional research methods, library database searches, and the assistance of professional librarians. Indeed, it is more important than ever that researchers know how to search effectively and think critically. Not only does Google Scholar challenge us to teach and reinforce the importance of sound research techniques on the part of students, it also provides us with a wonderful opportunity to better inform them of the wide range of resources already available to them. Students will want access to some of the full-text articles they find in Google Scholar, and some of them may be surprised to learn that a great many of those sources are already available to them here at Dover Memorial Library.

You can find more information about Google Scholar at the following links:

About Google Scholar and FAQ

Carol Tenopir, "Google in the Academic Library," Library Journal, February 2005, Vol. 130 Issue 2, p.32.

Brian Kenney, "Googlizers vs. Resistors," Library Journal, December 2004, Vol. 129, Issue 20, p.44-46.

Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price, "Web Search--Google Big News: 'Google Scholar' is Born," Resourceshelf.com, Thursday, November 18, 2004.

Barbara Quint, "Google Scholar Focuses on Research-Quality Content," Information Today, Inc., November 22, 2004.

Danny Sullivan, "Google Scholar Offers Access to Academic Information," SearchEngineWatch, November 18, 2004.