RE: DATABASES: Google Scholar

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

We shall be dealing more and more with these questions about the abilities
of the web to replace expensive databases.

My short answer is that good databses will still be needed, but that there
are many databases on the market which are not good, in the sense that
they either provide only keyword indexing, or have inconsistent subject
metadata. Databases in the second category can well be replaced by good
web services, for they offer nothing that a machine could not do as well
(the only problem is for non-machine readable metadata, as on print only
journals--these would need to be captured first.)

Many subjects need good thesaurus controlled metadata, at least until we
solve the general problem of artificial intelligence (which is
approximately equivalent to the problem of machine classification.)  
However, even here I do not rule out the possibility of solving the
subject analysis problem is special fields--surprisingly to me, one ofthem
may be structure searching in organic chemistry.

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

They will take long development, and will in any case be useful only to
the extent they can get to the data.

For the meantime, it makes sense to keep or buy good databases and get rid
of the useuless ones, regardless of the development of web services.  I am
not a medical librarian, but by simple observation it will be quite some
time until all medical journal articles are written in structured form,
suitable for harvesting.

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

________________________________

From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of David P. Dillard
Sent: Sun 11/21/2004 4:12 PM
To: Masterson, Michele
Subject: RE: DATABASES: Google Scholar

This quote from one article in one of my two posts may also be useful in
the interpretation of what is happening.

"Topics covered include medicine, physics, economics and computer science.
Documents in the Google Scholar search index are written in English,
German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, the company said."

New Google Scholar search service aimed at academics
By Laura Rohde
The Industry Standard
"Internet News for the Internet Business"
November 18, 2004
<http://www.thestandard.com/internetnews/000628.php>

The coverage in some disciplines is very uneven in juxtaposition to the
coverage of other subject fields.

A search of the phrase in quotation marks in Google Scholar "internet
search engines" produces some somewhat more modern material, for example.

PDF] Internet search enginesfluctuations in document accessibility W
Mettrop, P Nieuwenhuysen, H Smulders - Cited by 13 ... www.aslib.com.
INTERNET SEARCH ENGINES FLUCTUATIONS IN DOCUMENT ACCESSIBILITY. WOUTER
METTROP wouter.mettrop@cwi.nl. Centrum voor ... Journal of 
Documentation, 2001 - ingenta.com - ingenta.com

But even here, the bulk of the material is from 1999 and well before from
the sample observed, so one can begin to conclude that this source is
abudant in dated information.

A search of the word diabetes did, however, produce some much newer
citations.

The Wisconsin epidemiologic study of diabetic retinopathy. III.  
Prevalence and risk of diabetic D Care - Cited by 121 ... In a
population-based study in southern Wisconsin, 1,370 patients given
diagnoses of diabetes at age 30 years or older were examined using
standard protocols ... Diabetes Care, 2004 - archopht.ama-assn.org -
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Lipoprotein (a) levels and risk of coronary heart disease in men. The
lipid Research Clinics D Care - Cited by 132 ... Lipoprotein(a) Is an
Independent Risk Factor for Peripheral Arterial Disease in Chinese Type 2
Diabetic Patients in Taiwan Tseng Diabetes Care 2004;27:517-521. ...
Diabetes Care, 2004 - jama.ama-assn.org - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

But the diabetes search also produced quite a few old citations.

Somebody on the Mediev-L discussion group wanted to know if the advent of
Google Scholar meant that the library at this person's school was now at
liberty to cancel a number of expensive databases.  From what I am reading
in a variety of places and from limited observation, this would be a
dreadful move.  Like search engines in general, this resource will be good
for what one can get out of it, but to rely on it as a serious research
tool for important research would be dangerous to state the case mildly.

It is kind of like shopping at the dollar store.  You may find things
there that you can use, but one is not going to go there with their week's
shopping list.


Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
jwne@astro.temple.edu
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