Google Scholar, or ‘Schoogle’, a new web search service from Google, should prove useful to those of you searching for ’scholarly’ (ie academic) research articles in your studies. Google has isolated a subset of its (recently increased) 8 billion index which it considers to be scholarly material. This means that searches using Google Scholar should exclude thousands of unsuitable search results you may get using regular Google.
Google does not disclose the sources of its data or even the size of the scholarly subset. It has clearly made special arrangements with publishers and other data providers to allow it to access material in passworded subscription-only ‘deep web’ areas. As an indication of the size of the Scholar database, a search for ‘the’ using Google Scholar currently gives 289m results (compared with 8bn for regular Google).
The most interesting thing about Google Scholar seems to be its citation data, which make it an excellent citation database. Google scrapes the complete text of articles, including the citations. Google’s robots seem to be capable of reading and understanding citations - number of citations is one of the measures used to rank the search results. But, interestingly, Google Scholar actually provides a ‘cited by nnn’ link to a list of citations it knows about for each search result. Citation analysis is nothing new, but the comprehensive ones tend to be subscriber-only databases - for example Thomson’s ISI Web of Science (subscribed by the University), or Elsevier’s recently launched Scopus (not currently subscribed by the University). However, Google Scholar is freely available to all online.
Google have been working with the CrossRef organization on a comprehensive journal search project called CrossRef Search which is at pilot stage - try out the CrossRef Search box at Cambridge University Press for instance. CrossRef Search is planned as a freely accessible full text cross journal search service that, for example, any library would be able to include in its website. One cannot help wondering if Scholar is an offshoot of Google’s work on CrossRef Search. (By the way, it is possible to modify the
standard Google search URL to restrict it to CrossRef: add “&restrict=crossref” [without quotes] to the URL of a search you have done.)
Note that, unlike regular Google, you may not be able to access the full text of many of the articles found by Google Scholar. Google stipulates that abstract and citations must be accessible for every article it indexes, but not necessarily the full text of the article itself. You may be asked by a data provider to pay a small fee to see the full article - but please check with the Library first - we may have the actual journal hardcopy or you may be entitled to access the article for free via UL Electronic Resources. The UL home page now displays a message emphasizing this point. So, if you are acessing on-campus (and Cambridge subscribes to the relevant journal’s online access) you should be able to freely access the full text. Or, off-campus, you can use Athens passwords for those sources allowing it (get your Athens password from the library). Also note that some of Google Scholar’s results (from its citation gathering) will be offline resources - books, for example.
Google Scholar has one unique special syntax - author:[lastname]. The best way to search for a particular article is to use the author syntax plus a phrase (within double quotes). For example, author:einstein “theory of relativity”.
Google Scholar is currently a ‘beta’ (preview) service. Expect refinements and improvements. Some areas are not well served: conference proceedings for example, and open access (OA) articles could be flagged. Google Scholar is an attractive, easy to use search tool. But it is important to acquire a wide repertoire of search resources - access to an excellent and vast range of which are free to Cambridge students and staff through UL Electronic Resources.