Is Google enough?

Choosing appropriate resources

Roger Mills

What is Google?

• An ever-growing empire • Growing too fast?

• Many good ideas • Works well • But how? What is it really doing?

Only in Beta

• Features may change • Developing in tandem with Google Books, which will include digitised texts from Oxford collections and others • In competition with WoK, ScienceDirect, SCOPUS etc

Content

● Google Scholar has built an algorithm to identify scholarly materials crawled by Google from the open web.

● Google Scholar is also working with publishers to access materials locked behind subscription barriers. A requirement for inclusion is to release an abstract; full-text access will depend on institutional subscriptions or individual payment.

● Includes peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, full-text, citations, etc.

Google Scholar links to library catalogues (Open WorldCat)

● Google Scholar search results include a ‘library search’ link to the OCLC Open WorldCat ‘Find in a Library’ interface. ● From here, users can conduct a search on OLIS (based on ISBN/ISSN).

Google Scholar includes citation data

● Google Scholar uses ‘citation extraction’ to build connections between papers, even if the connections aren’t made via links.

● ‘Citation analysis’ is used to try and put the best papers at the top of the results list. ● Google search results include a ‘Cited by’ link – clicking on this link lists items (known by Google Scholar) that cite the original paper.

Searching Google Scholar

● ● ● ● ● ● + to include common words, letters or numbers that Google’s search technology generally ignores.

● “quote marks” to search for a phrase.

● minus sign – to exclude from a search.

OR for either search term.

author: for author search.

intitle: to search document title.

restrict by date and publication.

advanced search screen is offered.

Pros

● Available to anyone, anywhere, any time.

● Very fast. ● Includes a range of scholarly documents/types. ● By working with publishers Google Scholar is opening up ‘invisible’ content.

● Selects what it considers to be the best version of a paper and links to other versions after the description.

Pros

● Automatic correction of search terms.

● No advertising (although this may change).

● Links to library catalogues.

● Provides citation data. ● Ranks results by their relevance (although formula mysterious).

Cons

● Google Scholar is just the tip of the scholarly information iceberg and we don’t know what is included and excluded.

● Google is constantly crawling the web but how often is Google Scholar refreshed with new content?

● No response from their ‘contact us’ service. ● Whether the algorithm always accurately identifies scholarly literature is open to question.

● Some of the indexing is wrong (may improve from beta version), and journals may be listed in different ways (e.g. Journal of Biological Chemistry OR J Biol Chem).

Cons

● Limited search capabilities compared with bibliographic databases; no proximity searching, no searching on controlled terms, etc.

● No indication of ‘hit rate’ against search terms.

● No marking of results.

● Limited de-duplication of results.

● The lack of subject context can be problematic for terms with multiple meanings.

Biology search: glutathione in green Arabidopsis

WoS

Exact article in one step

Schgoogle phrase search: 15 articles, this one at 7

Schgoogle: keyword search, 2420, this one at 10

Google: keyword search, 17600, this one at 1

Google phrase search, 59, this at 1

Schgoogle: ‘all 7 versions’

Schgoogle cited by 2

WoS: cited by 3: inc Jan 05

Biological Abs phrase search: exact match in 1 note controlled keywords

Search on controlled terms

Omitting ‘green’, 14 results

Not including this one, first on Schgoogle

Need wildcard – arabidopsis-*

Conclusion: Maintain a balanced diet!