Google Scholar From a Student's Point of View

(Via Web4Lib) A student at MSU has written a blog article about using Google Scholar from a student's point of view. He also mocked up a sample webpage to explain the service, "Using Google Scholar In Your Library".

I'll begin with the statement that I like it. I wish something like this would have been around in the past when I was writing up some research papers. The killer feature in my mind is the ability to easily see who cites what. ... The ability to search the web for related items is also useful, as I may be able to find some background information that might make it easier for me to understand. ...

As a user of a library (I am not a Librarian) I can say, I hope federated search happens soon and it is built well. I personally hate using the online indexes that my library provides. As a user I think they are a pain to use, look terrible, and don't give the relevant results I want.

Jim Campbell from the University of Virginia Library, in a follow-up post to Web4Lib observed:

An integrated database like Google Scholar (or like Web of Science or Scopus) usually beats any of the metasearch products now available, not because they're bad, but because it's really hard to produce good results from very disparate databases working at different speeds and with some of them under restrictive licenses that may mean they won't accept a search at that moment. We've been saying that imperfect metasearch is better than no metasearch, but Google Scholar raises the bar. It will be interesting to see if the threat of Google Scholar makes database providers more likely to cooperate with metasearch engines. I wonder how much time they have to think about it.

Posted by Tom on November 24, 2004