Re: Google Scholar: Any Comments?

[Eric Hellman <eric@openly.com>]

At the risk of incurring wrath for double-publishing my observations on
Google Scholar...

Welcome to the Schoogle Era

Google Scholar. Wow!

I schoogle myself;
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=author:%22es+hellman%22&btnG=Search
and the results are almost perfect; note that proximity within the 
author field is not strongly weighted.

the cited-by is very good, perhaps the most impressive of all
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=link:YJaEpgpGhzwJ:scholar.google.com/

the clustering (aka deduping) is rather interesting
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=13310832962936951298
Note the double publishing noted by google.

subject searches work very well as long as the subject is arcane and
specialized. this is not a great tool for broad-subject research.

Elsevier content seems absent; so perhaps metasearch products have a lot
of life left.

Worldcat seems to provide most [book] content.

Sparse results in the humanities- "sung dynasty" returns 231 results and
5890 for "leonardo da vinci" compared to 212,000 for "stem cell"

the [citation] type is odd- many of the results could have been matched
up.

this shows some of Steve Lawrence's (ex CiteSeer, now at Google)
fingerprints in a number of places.

I think a significant number of library-world databases have just become
marginal niche products.

Eric Hellman, President                            Openly Informatics, Inc.
eric@openly.com                                    2 Broad St., 2nd Floor
tel 1-973-509-7800 fax 1-734-468-6216              Bloomfield, NJ 07003
http://www.openly.com/1cate/      1 Click Access To Everything



At 7:20 PM -0500 11/18/04, Masterson, Michele wrote:
> Has anyone tried the beta version?
>
> http://scholar.google.com/
>
> Any feedback as to how well it works?
>
> An interesting article about it: Google Scholar vs. Real Scholarship by
> Andrew Goodman
>
> http://www.traffick.com/2004/11/google-scholar-vs-real-scholarship.asp
>
> My disclosure: I am writing an article about the launch for Simba's
> newsletter, Professional Publishing Report, and would like to get your
> input about how easy-to-use and efficient the site is for conducting
> research.
>
> Best,
>
> Michele Masterson
> www.simbanet.com