1. What is Google Scholar?

2. The “Deep Web”

3. How does Google Scholar work?

4. The pros and cons of Google Scholar

5. Using Google Scholar

6. Google Books

“I want to make Google Scholar the one place to go

for scholarly information across all disciplines.”

Anurag Acharya

• Free and accessible web search engine for scientific

articles and books

• Information from journal publishers, university

repositories, and other websites that it has identified as

scholarly.

• Google Scholar (2014) had 99.3 million documents,

which is, approximately, 87% of the total number of

scholarly documents found on the web.*

* Khabsa, M. & Giles, C. 2014. The number of scholarly documents on the

public web. Plos One, 9(5): e93949.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0093949

Database A

Database cDatabase

B

Database D

Also includes material from :

• Google Books

• The general Google index (e.g. articles from authors

personal websites)

• Bibliographies of publications in Google Scholar

(indicated by [CITATION])

• Patents and USA Courts of law

• What is excluded?

• Journals and some books only available in print

• Journals and ebooks from publishers who do not co-

operate with Google Scholar

• Material found in the “Deep Web”

http://www.juanico.co.il/main%20frame%20-%20english/issues/information%20systems.htm

http://www.kn.att.com/wired/21stcent/wversus.html

http://scholar.google.co.za/intl/en/scholar/about.html

Needs affiliation to an institution:

• Automatic when you are on Campus

• Off Campus login

• Setup in Google Scholar settings (if not already done)

• Free (searching)

• Articles in non-peer reviewed journals

• Articles from conference proceedings

• Also covers chapters in books

• Indexes digital repositories

• Scholar metrics : top publications in subject fields

• Allows easy access to published articles compared with

other commercial databases (Google-like interface)

• Book coverage (via Google Books)

• Access to grey literature

• Coverage is dubious (what is included?)

• Does not search all published scholarly data

• Duplication leads to erroneous citation counts

• Relevance ranking heavily relies on the number of

citation counts

• Only 2 sorts (Relevance and Date)

• Many subscription databases are not included

• Poor Boolean searching

• Lack of advanced searching and refine options

• Doesn’t deal well with structured and tagged scholarly

documents resulting in inaccurate and nonsensical

data

Login, Microwave Fixation Versus Formalin Fixation. "of

Surgical and Autopsy Tissue." American Journal of Medical

Technology, vol. rr 435 (1978): 437.

Login, M. F. V. F. F. (1978). of Surgical and Autopsy

Tissue. American Journal of Medical Technology, vol.

rr, 435, 437.

Login, G.R. 1978. Microwave fixation versus formalin

fixation of surgical and autopsy tissue. American journal of

medical technology. 44(5):435-7.

Refine, U. I. "Developing a Task UI That Uses

Transient Data." Framework: Task UI Guide: 94.

Jasco, Peter. 2010. Metadata mega mess in Google

Scholar. Online Information Review. 34, 175-191.

Help is found under “About Google Scholar”

• Navigation of the start page

• Navigation of the results page

• My Library

• My Citations

• Alerts

• Metrics

• Settings

• Search box options

Saved

Save

Other Citation Analysis* tools :

1. Web of Science

2. Scopus

* H- Index or Hirsch-index

scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications

• Different databases (Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar) have different H indexes for the same author

• H index differs between disciplines (Space science and physics have the highest, and computer science, social science and multidisciplinary with the lowest)

Numerous criticisms of the H index:

• h-index does not account for the number of authors of a paper

• h-index discards the information contained in author placement in the authors' list, which in some scientific fields is significant

• Scientists with a short career are at an inherent disadvantage

• h-index gives books the same count as articles (some fields are more book-oriented such as the humanities)

• Scholar Metrics currently ONLY cover articles published between 2009 and 2013

Operators and wildcards

• “south africa” – exact phrase (use quotation marks /

inverted commas)

• Boolean searching including +, -, AND, OR, AND NOT

• e.g. “south africa” AND art AND apartheid

• e.g. apartheid NOT “south africa”

• DOES NOT support wild card searching for word varieties

beginning with a stem e.g. “south*” will not give you

“southern”, southwest” etc.

Search vocabulary

Google uses free text (no thesaurus or subject headings -

except books)

“hay fever” VS “allergic rhinitis”

Could use ‘“hay fever” OR “allergic rhinitis”’

• Navigation of the start page

• Navigation of the results page

Types of results:

Clickable title (info is available on line – either full text or

abstract)

[CITATION] means thet there is no online version but you are

able to view the papers that cited the work.

[BOOK] with a clickable title – version is online

[BOOK] without a clickable title – version is not online but

Google Scholar gives you a “Library Link” to find library with a

hard copy

[HTML] from tandfonline.com SFX@UCT

• Limiting by date

• Sorts : Relevance and Date

• Create Alert

• Settings and “My Citations” also accessible from Search

page (Down arrow at the top right next to “My citations”)

• Results:

• Cited by

• Related articles

• Cite

• All versions

• More …

“We just feel that this is part of our core mission. There is

fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search,

what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a web site.”

Sergey Brin Quoted in Nunberg, Geoffrey. “Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for

Scholars. The Chronicle Review. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 31 Aug.

2009.

• Libraries are “partners in crime”

• Bad metadata

• Automatic indexing of the full text results in errors

• Use of BISAC for subject headings : not helpful

• Different views :

• Full view

• Limited

• Snippet

• No preview available

• Advanced search

• Find in a library

• Search within the book

• About this book

• Google Play (was Android Market)

“Isn't it true that only librarians like to search?

Everyone else likes to find". [1]

“Finding is easy...” “…but reading is hard.” [2]

Can Google Scholar meet this "read faster" challenge?

1. Tennant, R. 2001. Digital Libraries- Cross-Database Search: One-Stop Shopping. Library journal. 15

October. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA170458.html

2. Sack, J. 2014. Helping Researchers See Farther Faster.

http://googlescholar.blogspot.com/2014/09/10th-anniversary-series-helping.html