Transcript Welcome to Gympie - Bodleian Library
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-*