Google Scholar Review

This month's Peter's Digital Reference Shelf has a review of the new Google Scholar search engine.

Google Scholar has enormous gaps in its coverage of publishers' archives, and implicitly in the direct links to the full-text documents therein. The citedness scores of documents displayed in the results lists have great potential for choosing the most promising articles and books on a subject, but they often are inflated. The prominent display of the citedness scores could help the scholars and practitioners whose libraries don't have access to the best citation-based systems, such as Web of Science and Scopus, or to the smartest implementations of citation-enhanced abstracting indexing databases, like some on CSA and EBSCO. Google should take a page from the best open-access services and repositories, such as CiteBase, Research Index and RePEc/LogEc, which handle citing and cited references and citedness scores much better than Google Scholar.

Posted by Tom on December 08, 2004