Searching Scholarly Literature

The Google Scholar Approach

Anurag Acharya

acha@google.com

Goal: Best possible scholarly search

Single place to find scholarly literature

– All areas, all languages, all time

Include all research from everywhere

– Provide worldwide visibility to all research

Index full articles, not just abstracts

– Much of the magic in Science lies in serendipity

Free for all users!

Overview

How far have we come?

– Largest scholarly search on the planet

– The most used scholarly search by far

– Worldwide cooperation with publishers/libraries

– Citing articles, related, recent ranking, alerts

New direction

– Google Scholar Citations

Coverage - sources All major and mid-size publishers/societies– Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Science, Nature, APS, ACS, IEEE, ACM, IOP, OUP, Sage, JSTOR, Taylor & Francis, Highwire, LWW, Wanfang Data, Chongqing VIP Info,…

Most smaller publishers & journals

All major public A&Is– PubMed, INIST, ADS, DTIC, ERIC, AGRIS, WHO,…

Google Books, US/CAN/EU/WO Patents

Repositories: arXiv, PubMed, RePec, SSRN,…

Coverage - languages

All major languages with scholarly content

– Latin and Cyrillic languages

– Simplified/Traditional Chinese

– Japanese, Korean

All regions with significant num of articles– US, China, UK, Brazil, Germany, France, Japan, Korea, Australia, India, Italy, Spain, Canada, Turkey, Mexico, Netherlands, Latin America, Scandinavia, Africa,…

All indexing automated

Usage Sustained growth – year over year Source countries:

– US, China, UK, Brazil, Australia, Germany,

– Japan, Canada, Turkey, Netherlands, Taiwan,

– India, South Korea, France, Spain, Italy,

– Sweden, South Africa, Mexico, Thailand,

– Malaysia, Indonesia, Switzerland, NZ, Columbia

– …, Burundi, Djibouti, Albania, Barbados,…– …, Eritrea, Somalia, Niger, Laos, Congo, …

Cooperation with libraries

Library links

– Direct access to library’s subscriptions

– Additional links in results for affiliated users

– Automated identification of user affiliation

– Over 4000 libraries worldwide, 30 consortia

Library Search

– Direct links to nearby library catalogs

– 25 national union catalogs

Google Scholar Citations Simple way to track citations to author’s articles.

– Compute citation metrics, citation graphs

– Citation metrics for all articles in all journals

Create automatically maintained profile

– Citation metrics are automatically updated

Public profiles can appear in Google Scholar results

How well does it work?

• Most users take about 10 mins to setup

• Automatically finds all of author’s papers– Sometimes, even ones forgotten by authors

• Citation metrics automatically updated

• As yet in limited release

• Planning to release to all users soon!

Finally… Lucky to live in era of information plenty

– Better information glut than information famine

Lucky to live in the era of connectivity

– Everyone everywhere can help build the same cathedral of knowledge

Lucky to live in the era of rapid change

– Opportunity to leave the world a little bit better