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Google Businesses The Internet

Google Scholar: Not Ready for Prime Time? 231

Posted by CmdrTaco from the is-the-first-version-of-anything-ready dept.
reptilicus writes "The Thomson Gale publishing group has put together a comprehensive review of Google Scholar, and they find it highly lacking compared with similar offerings from Highwire Press, Scopus, and The Web of Science. Will Google's overhyped offerings drive these superior services out of the market?"
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Google Scholar: Not Ready for Prime Time? More

Google Scholar: Not Ready for Prime Time?

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  • overhyped? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by brickballs ( 839527 )

    overhyped

    overhyped? I dont recall ever hearing of it. of course I havn't heard of the others either..

    • I haven't heard of it either, but it's cool as hell! I'll have to check out the other ones...

  • beta (Score:5, Funny)

    by MankyD ( 567984 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @11:38AM (#12824433) Homepage
    But it's still in Beta! Google would never release a service without taking it out of Beta first, of course.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @11:57AM (#12824625)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Ummmm... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Seoulstriker ( 748895 )
        Or maybe it really is in beta?
        • Or maybe it really is in beta?

          I figure that once you break 1 million users you are no longer eligible for Beta status. Not that I actually know how many users Gmail has (which is what the gp was obviously referencing).
    • Not only is it beta, but IMHO, it's actually better than all the alternatives thee author listed. When I look for a paper I go "hmm, I seem to remember Peter Fritzen doing a paper about automated algorithmic debugging"... I don't go "Oh... There was that paper by Peter Frutzen, in the ACM Lectures on Programming Languages and Systems, called Generalised Algorithmic Debugging and Testing in 1992"... And guess which search comes up with the correct paper as the first result.

      The author seems to want to enter

  • C'mon, people... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by gg3po ( 724025 )
    ...isn't this still in alpha or beta stage? Give'em a break, already.

  • Oh baby, YES! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I can't get enough google articles. Give me more!

  • OMG! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @11:39AM (#12824443)
    An article critical of google! I think my transmission link from my brain to slashdot groupthink just fused.
  • Will Google's overhyped offerings drive these superior services out of the market?

    Brought to you by Minimalist Posting Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

    • Anything else? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by QMO ( 836285 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @12:10PM (#12824747) Homepage Journal
      Has Google driven anyone out of the market?

      (I really don't know)

      If yes, did they actually have a truly better product/service?
      • Google killed off a few search engines. Google's search engine was significantly better, by pretty much any possible standard.

        • Re:Yes and yes. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by StringBlade ( 557322 )
          Which search engines were those?

          Last I checked, all the same search engines I used to use still exist: Altavista, Lycos, WebCrawler, Hotbot, Yahoo, AskJeeves. If you're talking about some obscure engine that doesn't exist anymore I hardly blame Google for that since they never made it out of obscurity.

          Granted, Google is my (and most people's) primary search engine because it is most accurate most often and is very fast with lots of nice tools (site:, cache:, etc.).

  • Just remember. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Neck_of_the_Woods ( 305788 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @11:40AM (#12824457) Journal
    Microsoft loved to put out something that was just good enough, but free to kill off everything else.

  • Google's advantage? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mister_llah ( 891540 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @11:42AM (#12824477) Homepage Journal
    At least for now...

    IT'S FREE!

    [looking at the other options, they are NOT free]

    ===

    I'd say in that regard, Google is way ahead...

    • Re:Google's advantage? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Otter ( 3800 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @11:46AM (#12824516) Journal
      HighWire is free, although the articles it links to may not be. (This is an advantage over Google, not a disadvantage.)

      The others are expensive curated services, and are hardly playing in the same league as the free services.

    • The same can be said for Internet Explorer, 1995-present. Free, and no installation required! Or is Microsoft evaluated differently?
      • The same can be said for Internet Explorer, 1995-present. Free, and no installation required! Or is Microsoft evaluated differently.

        Big difference. Google is taking its core technology to a field where it makes sense to use it. This is smart business. Yes, the Scholar is free, but so are their other search tools, Also, there's no reason to believe they're trying to undercut anyone with pricing, as their revenue is ad driven. They also haven't engaged in anything approaching anticompetitive behavior.

    • Re:Google's advantage? (Score:3, Informative)

      by f97tosc ( 578893 )
      Most universities have web of science (which indeed is a better product). This means that most users (=scientists) have access to it anyway. Tor

    • Doing actual research! Re:Google's advantage? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Google advantage is not only that its free, but it finds PDF's on the net! When doing research, true research, not just padding citations on my paper, I can't afford $5 or $10 for every paper that looks like it *might* be interesting. The walled-off, high-priced services are nasty and unusable if you really need to blast into new territory with research. Sounds to me like there's a sour grapes syndrome here, as authors and publishers alike discover that if their articles aren't free, aren't on the web, the

  • Utterly shocking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Otterley ( 29945 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @11:43AM (#12824488)
    What? A company whose mission is to provide content and research services to academia [gale.com] gives a poor review to one of its up-and-coming competitors' offerings? Say it isn't so!

    • Re:Utterly shocking (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ScytheBlade1 ( 772156 ) <scytheblade1@ave ... m ['geu' in gap]> on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @12:06PM (#12824711) Homepage Journal
      While you have a definite point, I believe that there may be a tad bit more to it than you make it out to be.

      "whose mission is to provide content and research services to academia"

      Also from that same page:
      "with 2004 revenues from continuing operations of $8.10 billion"


      You think...that's it's possible...that this company is doing it RIGHT? That it's possible that they know what they're talking about?

      I'm not claiming to know the answer. I don't use either service, but after reading your post, the obvious jumped out...

      Of course they're an apparent competitor. I just have this feeling, though, that they may actually know what they're doing. It's possible that you're right, it's possible that you're wrong, it's just that I don't see evidence as to either for a post like yours to hit +5 Insightful (which it is) without some counter-balance to it.

      If their entire goal is to provide a similar service, and they've made $8.10 billion....something tells me that they're doing something right, which may actually give base to their claims.
      • Microsoft (to trot out the obvious and tired example) makes a killing in the software market, but I don't trust their opinions of Linux.

        And you can't read that much about knowledge into how much money a company makes. Profit is as much an art of marketing and keeping costs down as it is making a quality product. If quality equated with profit directly, we'd all be using Apple or IBM machines and no one would have Windows. (And McDonalds would be out of business long since and no one would know who "Brit

      • Re:Utterly shocking (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        hmm...along this reasoning, it may be that Windows is really telling the truth on it's linux myths pages. Afterall, they earn billions on Windows, so they must be be the best authority on judging OS.

        Right?

        Bullshit.

        I've used Highwire, scholar and a couple of other (closed) systems to find relevant papers. The conclusion? I prefer google scholar.

        The reason? Most of the stuff I find is easily accessible. It really annoys me when I (or my University) has no access to more then the abstracts journal X. In fa
        • Slightly OT: It's my believe that you will get more citations if you publish in the more open journals, so I always prefer that.

          It is not just your belief, it is well established:

          http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/ [psu.edu]

          I think that as academia continues to pull its collective head out of its ass, and realizes that it does not need to pay for a multi-billion dollar publishing industry that gives nothing back (authors write for free, reviewers review for free, editors edit for free, yet my instituti

      • Re:Utterly shocking (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Gkeeper80 ( 71079 )
        It's not that the Gale group is a competitor, they're just not the target group for Google Scholar. They're and industry group. Scoopus and WoS are expensive products which are sold to libraries...and guess who makes the purchasing decissions in those places? Librarians!

        The librarians (and other experienced researchers, to be fair) expect the advanced searching functionality that these services provide. They're willing to pay for it and hope that their students will use it.

        Google Scholar is aimed much
        • Yes, but... the concern would be that as scholarship becomes open again that free services such as google would replace closed non-free services. Why would a library pay a fee to get the same service they already have free access to? They wouldn't. The real question is, then, do these middlemen provide added value? Or are they parasitic in nature?
          • I think you're exactly right, as more scholoarly material becomes availible for free these Abstracting and Indexing companies will have to change. Unfortunately, I don't think the current breed of publishers will ever release their content for free, they have no incentive to. But new materials will be published for free and until the copyrights expire, these services will still need to maintain licencing relationships with the proprietary publishers. The question will be how they handle the new Open Acce
        • you can do quite a lot of advanced searching in google, the difference is that you don't have to, the fact that google works without having to use arcane syntax is certainly no flaw. now if one of those fee based databases would give me even a limited SQL connection then i might see it worth paying for, but i spent hours searching through for decent references and found nothing but crap, while google found what i wanted in a few minutes.
          • You won't be likely to find any service that provides an SQL connection because no relational database systems that I know of have robust enough text parsing capabilities to search and index all of that data. However for the technically inclined, many services still offer the ability to search with the query language DIALOGUE. If you take the time to learn their query syntax, you may be more successful....then again that's the whole point of advanced features. If you're happy with the simple interface t
            • i have used dialog and the forms based systems, the main problem i had was doing recursive searches, search a topic then topics that come up from that topic, with the more complex query systems it is too easy to do one or two just wrong enough to get few or no good results, but still a valid query so no error messages.
      • Kinda like MS is doing something right with their OS design and implementation?
      • It also gives them 8.10 billion reasons to knock Google off before they take some of that money.

    • Re:Utterly shocking (Score:3, Insightful)

      by anonicon ( 215837 )
      Your point is made on the conflict of interest. But, if you read the review linked from the front page, it makes several key points about why Google's Scholar service is pretty poor. No structured XML/other output, no listed, covered research publications, no index- or directory-browsing options, no fuzzy logic operants for branch-defining a research institute's name wildcards, and much more.

      Yes, it's free, but given the time and productivity constraints that the professionals who will be using this are un
      • My guess is dropping this product into Beta will give users the ability to request such features, at which time they can be added.

        I actually see this as being one of the huge advantages of Gmail Beta; they release a core set of services which they believe to be agnostic, and then ask which services will be preferred to be added, instead of wasting their time coding something that won't go to use.

        For Google Scholar, it's in a very, very premature mode. Give them a couple of months, request some features,
      • Yes, it's free, but... this is the classic case of being free only if your time is worth nothing.

        Oh, that's OK, then. They just need to redefine their target audience from "professionals" to "grad students".

    • A company whose mission is to provide content and research services to academia gives a poor review to one of its up-and-coming competitors' offerings? Say it isn't so!

      Fair enough. But at the same time:

      • Google search is so littered with search-optimized sites, I get pages of the same porno/fake-search-portal sites instead of results I want, and this has been true for years. Just like old search engines like Altavista and the old Yahoo search...searching has become an exercise of having to really clo
    • What? A company whose mission is to provide content and research services to academia gives a poor review to one of its up-and-coming competitors' offerings? Say it isn't so!
      Not only gives a poor review, but backs it up with facts and figures. Not only does it give Google (competitor) a poor review - it gives Highwire Press (another competitor) a *positive* review. But the Google fanboy doesn't allow himself to be swayed by facts.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @11:45AM (#12824502)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Thought: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Gothic_Walrus ( 692125 )
    Why focus on a niche search engine when you can put more effort into the one that is used by millions and is the public face of your company?

    I didn't know Google Scholar existed until I downloaded the IE Toolbar and saw it as a search option. If I read a story about how Google is making their Scholar search engine better, chances are I'd be completely indifferent to it. I don't use it, so why should I care?

    (That could change, since I start college in the fall. But I digress.)

    Google's got their pr

  • Of course they trash their competition (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @11:47AM (#12824523)
    As the article mentions, there are only two other multidisciplinary academic databases, web of science and scopus. Both are expensive. Google is free. I have access to (and use) web of science, and google blows it out of the water in terms of speed and user interface. Its database is generally pretty good too.

    Not bad for free.
    • erm, what happened to Expanded Academic ASAP (the Thomson-Gale full-text product), Project MUSE (Johns Hopkins), and JSTOR? I've always found those to be the three most useful databases of peer-reviewed articles, and all three are most definitely interdisciplinary, covering thousands of journals in dozens of fields.

  • It's one thing to have all the information (Score:3, Insightful)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @11:50AM (#12824556) Homepage Journal
    It's entirely another to organize it in a way that is meaningful to those attempting to access it.

    The beta argument doesn't wash with me. Virtually everything Google is doing today is beta. It's a cutesy way to hide behind any mistakes in a production service, because you can always say, "whoops! well, remember, it's only beta!"

    • Re:It's one thing to have all the information (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Mac Degger ( 576336 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @12:25PM (#12824876) Journal
      You're right. They should have scholar.google.com locked up in a testlab, accessible only to google employees. until they iron out ALL the bugs. That's far better than to let all acedemia use it right now for the benefit they could recieve using it.

      As should be obvious, I think you're nuts. I've used google scholar for projects at uni for a while now, and it has been quite usefull. It could be better (direct display of homonyms...you never know what jargon scientists will use for the same bloody phenomenon), but it's usefull in it's current state. I'm far happier being able to use it now. If they want to call it beta, fine for them.

  • Spreading the goodness too thin (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RealProgrammer ( 723725 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @11:51AM (#12824570) Homepage Journal
    Google is guilty of a bit of overconfidence, maybe, in expanding into areas they know little about, but I think Google Scholar is why there is a Google.

    Google's founders were academics. Their focus is on creating ways to find information. Finding academic information ought to be their pet project.

    The kicker is that if someone else does it better, Google will just buy them.
    • No, the kicker is that Google engineers read Slashdot, and they really care to improve their services. Wait and see. Either they drop Google Schole (which I doubt) and it will surpass everybody else.
      • Couldn't agree more, and you touched on the core issue as well.

        Google needs Time. Something they can't buy, something they can't be granted any other way. They need this service to be open, so that they can hear these complaints, so that they can change. You can't be dynamic in a lab; you don't know what things the user will want. The very rudaments you can add in, yes, which is where I believe it stands now, but give it time, more complex things will come.

        I can't wait personally. I've had many a resear
        • Google needs Time. Something they can't buy...
          Oh, I dunno. AOL managed to buy Time when they were overvalued...
    • I'm also getting the impression they're spread too thin. I'm a publisher in the Google Print program, which is mentioned in the article. Unfortunately the article [libraryjournal.com] they link to isn't available for free (only the abstract is).

      I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me --- after all, Google is essentially offering me free advertizing --- but they just don't seem to have it together. I sent my books in, and they scanned them quite promptly. In my account, they showed up as "processed," and it said that they

  • Astronomy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by v@mp ( 136150 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @11:51AM (#12824571) Homepage
    I am a researcher in Astronomy and I have found that Google Schalor is very lacking in my field. They have bigger competition in Astronomy than in most fields because all of the journal articles in Astronomy going back a century have been scanned, cross referenced and are available from the NASA/Harvard Database [harvard.edu].

    They have a long way to go to compete with that.

  • Repository != Search Service (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Peter_Pork ( 627313 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @11:54AM (#12824594)

    Google Scholar is not an attempt to replicate repositories like citeseer and the like. It is a specialized search service! If I search for a paper using Scholar, I get links from many different repositories, and from the web site of the authors. That's what this is all about. Furthermore, as a researcher, I always use plain Google or Google Scholar to locate papers, and I do have access to every other service. Google is just better at it than any other service. Do you know why? Because it gets the job done without any brain damage search language, without broken links and it searches the whole web, not just your random journal list. Can Google Scholar improve? Sure, but the article is pretty biased against a free (as in beer) service.

    Also, there are other great free indexes out there that are not even mentioned in the article, like DBLP [uni-trier.de].

  • What's the big deal? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Wee ( 17189 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @11:54AM (#12824598)
    So the free (and relatively new) offering isn't as good as the pay services. So what? Most researchers have probably been using the pay services already (unless they only started doing their work 6 months ago, and even then their department likely has access to the subscription stuff), so now they can use the free Google service to supplement that. How can more information be bad?

    That business about "otherwise very intelligent people have succumbed to stupidity by using Google Scholar to the exclusion of the other, much better services" sounds like the author has a personal or financial stake in WoS or Scopus. Or just a chip on his shoulder, axe to grind, whatever. Either way, the reviewer comes off sounding like an pompous asshole.

    If you use Google Scholar and get what you need, then at least you didn't pay anything for the privilege. If they were charging money and it sucked, yeah, I could see someone whining about it. But for free?

    -B

    • How can more information be bad?

      With most research, it is the quality and not the quantity of information that is more important. It's a lot easier to find a needle in a haystack if there is less hay and only one needle.

    • That business about "otherwise very intelligent people have succumbed to stupidity by using Google Scholar to the exclusion of the other, much better services" sounds like the author has a personal or financial stake in WoS or Scopus.

      No, it sounds like somebody with some knowledge of the tech-savvy generation in the freshman-to-Masters range today - a generation that tends to leap on the latest e-trend, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. A generation that leaps on things that are free, whethe

  • Two reasons: a) The services to which they are comparing Google Scholar are extremely expensive. It is like comparing free TV to a movie you pay see in the theater, and getting all bent out of shape because TV has commercials and isn't in widescreen. Well, duh. b) The reviewer is obviously biased. This is not a review, it is marketing for the other services that are "superior" to Google Scholar. You can see this kind of stuff on pretty much any product site. But that other crap isn't on the front pag

  • TFA misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jeremymiles ( 725644 ) * on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @12:02PM (#12824681) Homepage Journal
    I use Google Scholar and Web of Science on a pretty regular basis - I'm not familiar with Scopus, so I can't comment on that. TFA doesn't mention Pubmed [pubmed.org] either, which is free.

    It seems to me TFA has have missed the point of Google Scholar. Web of science does abstract, keyword and title searches. And it's very good at them. Google Scholar does full text searches. If I want to know if there has been a study on the effects of ibuprofen on slugs (or whatever), I go to WoS. However, sometimes you want something in the details, which isn't mentioned in the abstract or title. I sometimes want papers that have used a particular statistical technique - I'm not (very) interested in the substantive content, I just want a nice example. WoS - no use at all. Google Scholar - excellent.

    When you get your results, WOS gives you the abstract. Google Scholar points you to the full text source - often you have to pay for it, but you have it there.

    People who get obsessive about systematically reviewing the literature [york.ac.uk] and making sure that they have accessed everything on the subject are never going to use Google Scholar. People who want to know more about a subject are better off with Google Scholar.

    On citation searches, WoS wins hands down (IMHO).

  • Google Scholar is fine... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GileadGreene ( 539584 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @12:05PM (#12824702) Homepage
    Google Scholar is fine for what it sets out to be: Google that restricts its searches to academic content.

    Is it a replacement for, e.g. Citeseer [psu.edu]? No. But then it isn't intended to be.

    What Google Scholar provides is a useful metasearch across existing archives (like Citeseer, the IEEE, the ACM, and so on). It can be handy for finding odd connections between topics covered in different archives. It can also be handy for trawling through those archives using a different search algorithm than the defaults provided by the archive itself. I can't see Google Scholar ever replacing Citeseer - I see it continuing to complement Citeseer.

  • It works better than CiteSeer, with its poor overloaded little webserver, ever has.

    And a version of CiteSeer that isn't going down all the time is basically all I need.

    So I'm satisfied.
    • I don't think that Google Scholar is meant to be a replacement for citeseer... It doesn't even cache the papers, which citeseer does (in several formats).

      Yes, citeseer's server is usually overloaded, but I've never had any big problems with that either (I can always download the papers I want, even if at a slow speed).
  • Google Scholar: Not Ready for Prime Time?

    Of course it's not ready for prime time, when it is, google will eliminate the BETA VERSION tag...
  • What's needed is an application that will search all of these databases and provide a unified interface to the user.

  • Search styles (Score:3, Informative)

    by Kontinuum ( 866086 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @12:22PM (#12824848)
    I do research in medical image analysis, and I regularly use both Google Scholar and PubMed. I think that there's a big stylistic difference about how different people approach these searches. Going to college and grad school in the mid to late 90's into the 2000s, I grew up (academically, at least) with the idea that I should be able to just type a few words into a search bar and a bunch of related stuff would come up, without having to think too much about where in the document it was located and whether it was a keyword or whether I was searching for the institution or publisher or whatever.

    Older scientists grew up searching those big bound hardback science citation indices, where you had to think very hard about keywords and publishers and such. Even the abstract was more critical then, because you couldn't just grab articles willy nilly onto your desktop and then sort them out later.

    I think of it like the difference between my parents and myself when searching for stuff on the web ... my parents like to go to Yahoo and descend down the well organized categories until they get what they want, whereas I just type a bunch of phrases into Google. I'm not saying one way is better than the other ... it's just a different style.

    That being said, Google Scholar does need a bit more polishing, but I still use it a lot. However, until you can grab citation info into Endnote or Bibtex, it don't see it replacing anything soon.

  • Thompson-Gale... (Score:2, Informative)

    by MattGWU ( 86623 )
    Any relationship to Thompson-West, who do massive databases of things like Westlaw? Why yes, there IS a relationship. That's why they think it's 'overhyped'...they are probably in a decent position to put together their own competing service.
  • What exactly is missing from the word 'hype' that it needs an 'over-' in front of it? Given that I haven't seen much said publicly about Google Scholar, that I've never seen grandiose claims made for it, and that most of my friends who don't need access to academic papers have never heard of it, I'm beginning to understand what 'overhype' means. It's a word you use when you want to generate hype, not about a product, but about the idea that it has been hyped. 'Overhype' is a word used to hype hype itself.
  • Since when was Google's offering in this field highly hyped? Or hyped much at all? Have you been reading slashdot again?

  • wrong question (Score:5, Informative)

    by jilles ( 20976 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2005 @01:01PM (#12825250) Homepage
    The question is not whether google is good enough but wether the commercial offerings are good enough.

    As others point out google scholar is free. Generally commercial solutions aren't and work on subscription basis.

    Furthermore google scholar works by basically more or less the same strategies as regular google. Put some search terms in the box and relevant search results will surface. This is a different strategy than the traditional solutions which index many different kinds of metadata and allow for elaborate searches based on that metadata. Both strategies have their place but eventually price and convenience will determine who dominates the market. If simple queries are your thing, google scholar is the preferred search engine. If you are a fussy librarian, you probably need something more sophisticated.

    I'm a researcher who is not associated with a research institute and thus has no access to academic search engines, online subscriptions, etc. I do have access to google scholar. If your article shows up there with a download link for the pdf I can read it. Otherwise I have to make an effort to read your article. The way scientific publications work has changed over the past few years. Journal publications give you status, google gives you exposure. Many researchers end up reading my articles after doing a google query, not after consulting a table of contents of some journal. Google is convenient that's why it works so well.

    I have a number of different use cases that are typical for me:
    - get some useful references on a topic
    - look up the correct reference for something you have read
    - find stuff written someone you've read other stuff from
    - find out who is citing you

    All these things google scholar does well. If you are a researcher it is in your interest to make sure google returns relevant search results if people look for your work stuff that is related to your work. Putting your articles on a website is all you need to do.

    • If you are a researcher it is in your interest to [...]. Putting your articles on a website is all you need to do.
      That may be the core issue that this reviewer has (but doesn't dare state). The old established journals (and by association the commercial databases of old established journals) absolutely do NOT want you putting your articles on the web.

      Google Scholar's real threat is probably not that it is a worse/better/whatever academic search engine - but rather that it could add a lot of momentum to
  • I've used most of the big academic search engines, and there's one area where google just blows everyone else away: the interface. No one else can hold a candle to the 'type some shit and get what you want back' google scholar search. Yeah, sure, it may be an 'incomplete' database, but what is there is VERY easy to find in my experience. When they've got more stuff indexed, this thing is going to rock. It's already the first place I turn when I need to pull up a citation, and I rarely have to go to one

  • Googlix? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Sprotch ( 832431 )
    As as lawyer having to rely on Lexis on Westlaw (expensive internet legal databases), I find their "search" engine a real pain. I can't imagine how it could be worse. If google would start a competitive database, they could win the whole market in a flash.
  • ...it is a review by Peter Jasco, who is an independent reviewer.

    http://www2.hawaii.edu/~jacso/ [hawaii.edu]

    We just provide him the space to post his reviews.
    As we do for several others...

    http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/reference/ index.htm [galegroup.com]

    "Visit gale.com regularly to check out the latest reviews on reference resources by these prominent experts:"
  • Now the Evil Google Empire will fall because their BETA software isn't ready for prime time. Good thing Microsoft releases such clean beta software. Probably why they are so successful.
  • When was the last time Highwire Press, Scopus, or The Web of Science, got /. coverage? Have any of these ever? Why do we need a special catagory and daily coverager of every tool Google looks at?
  • Highwire from Stanford looks good but it suffers from the same problem all library search tools have. You misspell a keyword or an author and you get back: "Your search criteria matched zero articles."A database search, where nothing is returned is frustrating. Google has solved this problem.

    It has been said before: the review by Thomsom Gale compairs its own product to Google Scholar and can therefore not be taken seriously.
  • In the end, it all depends how you use it and what you want it to be. Scifinder Scholar (no relation to the Google service, despite the lawsuit) and Beilstein are probably the two most-used indexes used in chemistry. I'll use Web of Science once in a while, as well. They are all very good at what they do (some annoying twitches of each aside), which is why my University is shelling out lot of money for them. The problem with site-licensed databases is they need an on-campus IP address, which sucks when
  • --while in other news, Microsoft finds Linux highly lacking.
  • Google Scholar has been around for ages now... Why is this news?

  • No (Score:2)

    by drix ( 4602 )
    I believe Google's superior stock valuation will drive these services into Google.
  • I do not know about you but usually I use www.scirus.com to search for scientific references. It is a really great place to start.

    Also the filetype:pdf google search command is quite handly

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