RE: DATABASES: Google Scholar

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

Thomas, my dear friend and colleague,

I too agree, and have said in various places, that RePEc is at present the
best available web indexing service, both in design and execution. It is
especially noteworthy that it has been implemented by a small group of
noncommercial developers, not a large enterprise.

It is even more remakable that it is (to my knowledge) the only database
system for article-level content (or the web equivalent) that has attained
controlled author metadata. The more experience one has with even good
systems that cannot tell apart authors of the same name, the more this
will be appreciated--and I hope emulated.

It nonethless covers a small defined body of material, and it is possible
that some of its features (like the author authority control)
 may be difficult to implement on a much larger scale.

Dr. David Goodman 
Palmer School of Library and Information Science 
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Thomas Krichel
Sent: Thu 11/25/2004 10:15 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: DATABASES: Google Scholar
 
David Goodman writes

> I used the term _good_ web services. I suspect that what we now see is
> just the embryonic stages.

Examples for more than embronic services are given by the RePEc services.
See Peter Jasco's review, in Online, 1 May 2004, Volume 28; Issue 3. Here
is what Peter writes in his introduction

| All three reviews in this issue focus on economic literature
| databases. Economics has been the turf of the EconLit database for
| decades. In the past few years, however, there have been many projects
| to make at least the abstracts of substantial economic research papers
| freely available through the Web. One of the most successful of the
| international collaborative efforts is the RePEc (Research Papers in
| Economics) archive, which is being implemented with different features
| by talented economists and programmers in many countries as varied as
| Sweden, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S.
| 
| My first pick is IDEAS, one of the many excellent implementations of
| the RePEc collection of free abstracts for more than 200,000 journal
| articles, working papers, books, book chapters, and software. Over
| half of the abstracts have links to the full-text digital version. The
| other pick is a spectacularly well-implemented bibliometric service
| that delivers very informative statistics about the papers, journals,
| series, and authors in RePEc. The pan is the American Economic
| Association's EconLit database, which is widely licensed by many
| college libraries and research centers, but is becoming increasingly
| less and less state of the art.

Disclosure: I am the founder of RePEc. 

Cheers,

Thomas Krichel                      mailto:krichel@openlib.org
                                 http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                             RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel