Roger Mills February 2007

don’t be evil

stand on the shoulders of giants

beta

Launched Nov 2004 Still beta (Relatively) rapturously received Relationship cooled a bit Secrecy – (still) don’t know: Coverage Publisher agreements Ranking algorithms Classification assigned

The difference Reaches behind payment/password walls But only by arrangement with publishers Many publishers make some content free anyway – which can be found on normal Google

Added value Fast and free Available to anyone, anywhere, any time Non-scholarly material excluded Relevance ranking Identifies other versions Citation data Library holdings via OpenURL Full text where library subscribes Broad context classification Automatic correction of search terms Direct import to RefWorks and EndNote

But no Set creation Combining searches Saving and ing results Creating alerts Controlled vocabulary Proximity searching Standardisation of journal names/abbreviations Info on what is included and what is not Indication of update frequency – seems slower than normal Google Info on how the system decides what is scholarly Hit rate figures for individual search terms

What’s in it? “Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.”

Only in Beta Features may change Developing in tandem with Google Books, which will include digitised texts from Oxford collections and others In competition with WoK, ScienceDirect, SCOPUS, Scirus etc

Content Algorithm to identify scholarly materials crawled by Google from the open web Access to materials locked behind subscription barriers Must include abstract Full-text access requires institutional subscriptions or individual payment Includes peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, full-text, citations, etc.

Library links Includes OpenURL links to local library holdings In Oxford displays as ‘Oxford Full Text’ beside title

Includes citation data Uses ‘citation extraction’ to build connections between papers ‘Cited by’ link lists items (known to Google Scholar) that cite the original paper Cited items not available online are listed with prefix [citation] ‘Citation analysis’ puts the most-cited papers at the top of the results list

Searching AND implied between words as in normal Google + to include common words, letters or numbers that Google’s search technology generally ignores “quote marks” to search for a phrase minus sign – to exclude from a search OR for either search term author: for author search intitle: to search document title restrict by date and publication advanced search screen available

Help screens

Earlier version

Biology search: glutathione in green Arabidopsis

WoS

Exact article in one step

Scholar phrase search 2005: 15 results, this one at 7

Scholar phrase search 2006: 16 results, this one first

Scholar keyword search 2005: 2420 results, this one at 10

Scholar keyword search 2006: 4800 results, this one first

Google keyword search 2005: results, this one first

Google keyword search 2006: articles, this one first

Google phrase search 2005: 59 results, this first

Google phrase search 2006: 86 results, this first

Scholar 2005: ‘all 7 versions’

Scholar 2005: cited by 2

Scholar 2006: cited by 14

WoS 2005: cited by 3

WoS 2006: cited by 15

Comparing citations data: 2005 X GS X SC

Comparing citations data: 2006 X GS

Citations arranged by most cited

SCIRUS: search engine for science

Preferred web sources

SCIRUS phrase search: 2 journals, this first; 8 other web sources (inc previous versions of this talk!)

SCIRUS keyword search: 735 journals, this first; 6996 others

SCIRUS Very similar functionality to Scholar but can also: Mark records Save records records SCIRUS searches are included in SCOPUS which allows direct export to RefWorks SCOPUS and SCIRUS allowing saving in RIS format for EndNote

Biological Abs phrase search: exact match in 1 note controlled keywords

Search on controlled terms in Biological Abstracts

Omitting ‘green’, 14 results

Not including this one, first on Scholar

Need wildcard – arabidopsis-*

Conclusion Maintain a balanced diet! Five a day… WoK, SCIRUS, Scopus, subject-specific database, Google Scholar…

EXERCISE Look for articles on forestry info by Roger Mills In Google and Google Scholar, Scirus and Scopus Note the differences between phrase and keyword searching Try using author: delimiter in GS