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Google Businesses The Internet

Google Launches Scholar Beta 158

Posted by CowboyNeal from the google-this-google-that dept.
Jaidev writes "'Stand on the shoulders of giants' is what Google claims its new service allows you to do. Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."
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Google Launches Scholar Beta More

Google Launches Scholar Beta

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  • Dupe/old news (Score:5, Funny)

    by frazzydee ( 731240 ) * on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:37AM (#13144375)
    A typo seen in the first character?! CoyboyNeal, this must be a record!

    Oh, and maybe this was a dream, but wasn't Google Scholar launched a long time ago? Nope, wasn't a dream: this entry [blogspot.com] in the google blog (dated October 18th 2004) announces the launch of the beta version. Although scholar is still in beta, surely it shouldn't be referred to as google's "new" service. This story is also (needless to say) a Dupe [slashdot.org].

  • homework solved! (Score:5, Funny)

    by intmainvoid ( 109559 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:38AM (#13144379)
    They should have just cut to the chase and called it Google Homework.

    • Re:homework solved! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hoka ( 880785 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:49AM (#13144454)
      I don't see why they should. I've had a significant amount of luck using it before for gathering work for research papers and upper division writing classes (Comp Sci ones that is). I've also used it a bit in my offtime to look for some cool things, though I havn't had much luck in that regard.

    • Re:homework solved! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Buran ( 150348 )
      I'd like to see your average grade school or college kid make use of the sort of thing Google Scholar is aimed at. This is high-level research paper work it's aimed at (many of its results are papers from scholarly journals) and while "homework" may occasionally refer them, I'd say that's a little out of the "homework" league ...
      • This is high-level research paper work it's aimed at ...

        The only results I've gotten from Google Scholar are links to ACM publications that require a $100/year subscription fee to access. Hopefully, Google Scholar has improved since then.

        • Re:Follow the money. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Buran ( 150348 )
          I can't read a lot of the links from home but can if I'm on campus, which has a sitewide read license for many journals. I think Google Scholar is meant for researchers' use (like my lab's) more than it is the general public.

          it IS annoying, however. Take a look at the Public Library of Science http://www.plos.org/ [plos.org] for an organization that believes in open access for everyone. I'm hoping that takes off.
  • Because back in January I used it to do research for a paper.
  • Thank you for posting this informative information, next would you mind running a story on google maps, google news, and maybe google firefox toolbar?

    I can't believe these people are making more money than I am.

  • Intriguing. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by millennial ( 830897 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:38AM (#13144384) Journal
    One problem with standing on the shoulders of giants:
    You have to figure out how to climb them first.
    Seriously, though, this seems like what the internet was meant to be, back in "the day." IIRC, the 'net started out as an joint initiative involving the government and several academic institutions as a means of creating a repository of knowledge. I'm glad Google is getting into this game, since they seem to have a pretty solid search method figured out. Besides, it could certainly make researching for my thesis a bit easier.
    • Invented at CERN... which is where I'll hopefully be working in another few years :) http://www.hitmill.com/internet/web_history.html [hitmill.com]

    • Re:Intriguing. (Score:3, Funny)

      by snarkh ( 118018 )
      One problem with standing on the shoulders of giants: You have to figure out how to climb them

      Simple -- run them into the ground first.

    • Re:Intriguing. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hazem ( 472289 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @01:32PM (#13144970) Journal
      The other thing about the "standing on the shoulders of giants" is that many believe that Newton was being mean-spirited when he said it, rather than visionary in his views of the source of his brilliance.

      "Science: A History 1534-2001" by John Gribbin which suggests that his comment was in fact a barely disguised personal attack. It written in a letter to a scientific competitor, Robert Hooke, who had complained, correctly, that Newton was not giving him proper credit for his discoveries. Newton's response that he had seen further by "standing on the shoulders of Giants" was intended to rule out Hooke, who was famously short and hunchbacked. This is not 100% accepted history but it does seem to fit in with Newton's general demenour and behaviour.

      It's a great saying, nonetheless.

  • This is news? (Score:3, Informative)

    by DosBubba ( 766897 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:38AM (#13144385)
    Google Scholar was launched 11/18/04.

  • Neat. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Short Circuit ( 52384 ) * <mikemol@gmail.com> on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:38AM (#13144386) Homepage Journal
    Professors don't like it when I use multiple Wikipedia references...

    • Re:Neat. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MyLongNickName ( 822545 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:52AM (#13144470) Journal
      Many wiki articles cite the sources they use. Why not refer to the original instead of wiki? Often those sources will give you much more information than the wiki.
      • Because it was a joke... :-P
      • Because if you were using the wiki and not the sources that the wiki cites, it would be slightly unethicacl to say otherwise. And if you didn't use the original sources, how do you know which facts came from which source? Most likely, not all the sources are original anyways, but books or articles with their own references. Should you trace everything back to the original?
        • Novel idea: You'd actually go read the sources. No, you can't quite get back to the beginning in most cases, but the level of scholarship you are after determines how far back you'd trace.
          • Yes, the level of scholarship you're after determines how fra back you should go, but if you are a student, it is not only not generally necessary, but often difficult to track down original sources. If a book or paper is not available at your library, or if you don't have the time to read 15 different papers on a topic for a small report, you are out of luck.

            And if you cite the source without reading it (which is what I think was implied in ggp), that seems every so slightly unethical.
            • And if you cite the source without reading it (which is what I think was implied in ggp), that seems every so slightly unethical.

              That wasn't what I meant.... unless, of course, you work for the New York Times...
    • You can use all the Wikipedia references you want in our classes: http://www.itm.iit.edu/ [iit.edu]!

  • Is this news? (Score:4, Informative)

    by geighaus ( 670864 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:39AM (#13144389)
    The service has been around at least for a year. What exactly has been added to it now?

  • Research edge (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fugginsuds ( 561973 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:39AM (#13144395)
    Does it not bother anyone but me that this will give Google a monstrous research edge, as they will be able to determine trend data, as well as searches that have no results, meaning items that have not yet been researched or published. I find this extremely disturbing that a company can do that.
    • This might be a page for you to check out:

      http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=tin+foil+hat [google.com]
    • oohh nooo, they may be able to find out what needs to be learned. Wouldn't you think its better to find out sooner about something that needs to be reaserched and understood, to have more time to reaserch it. well not more time really, but just being able to find out about it now rather than in two years is great. that means we reap the benefits of it sooner.
    • this will give Google a monstrous research edge, as they will be able to determine trend data, as well as searches that have no results, meaning items that have not yet been researched or published

      There goes my secret FTL drive.

    • Re:Research edge (Score:5, Informative)

      by 0xC0FFEE ( 763100 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @12:40PM (#13144684)
      Nah, CiteSeer is still THE resource for Computer Science related papers. And it's sponsored (in part) my Microsoft Research (where has NEC gone?). So we have a nice healthy competition going on. yay!
      • I have to disagree. Google Scholar finds far more CompSci papers than CiteSeer does, and 90% of the time you can find a better result just searching ACM portal.
        • CiteSeer is a lot more complete. For instance, you can naviguate citations, finding papers citing a given papers. You can easily find related papers, see other papers by given authors, see citation frequency graphs. It's simply a more natural interface for "surfing" the litterature. It contains a cache for most articles in .ps and .pdf, a link to the authors home pages. Frankly, Scholar is little more than a subset of the whole Google restricted to research.

          As for the ACM, you must be a paying member or h

          • I agree. Citeseer was invaluable to me when I was doing my final thesis. Contrary to scholar.google.com, which returns mostly links to pay to view sites, it returns those and many more links. The UI is also superior as you said.
      • Perhaps so, but google scholar covers much more than just comp sci research. I've been using it for months already for health care related acedemic research.
      • CiteSeer was the previous work of a current Google employee. That was what he was up to *prior* to starting at Google. There is absolutely no reason why they cannot improve upon it now, with their massively larger corpus and massively more responsive CPU farm.

    • Google can do it only if it provides a service useful enough for people to feed it with the data you claim they 'disturbingly' collect. If you don't want to feed them this data, don't use Google scholar. There are other options, also online, many of them need to be paid for (and Google is free).

      It's as simple as that.
    • Well, to be honest most of the time it's hard enough to figure out where exactly trends are leading and what's the best problem/method combination to try next even if you're a researcher plum in the middle of an area, and have all the data and insight required. It would be quite a hard bet to get anywhere close with keyword-oriented statistical analysis:)

  • Dupe aside (Score:2, Informative)

    by mfloy ( 899187 )
    This service has been out for a long time, but dupe aside, it is a very useful site. Academically, it allows you to search journal articles without having to sift through all of the other junk generated with a standard Google search. I am a big fan of this site and I use it quite often.

  • Since we're digging up old Google stories... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Smitedogg ( 527493 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:40AM (#13144399) Homepage
    In related news, Google announced today that they're going to hold their IPO.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:42AM (#13144412)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Not ready? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by cdills ( 879529 )
      This has been discussed at length before, but the determination of the /. crowd was that though Scholar and things like Highwire profess to "do the same thing", they don't.

      Highwire allows you to search for articles in catagories, published on certain dates, regarding certain topics. It's a classic database search engine, where the database contains simple information about articles. Scholar is a FULL TEXT search engine.

      If you want to find all the articles that relate to Penguin migration patterns, use Hig
    • I am honestly suprised that Google's homepage doesn't say beta. Everything else does, be it news, groups, mail, Scholar, Froogle, maps, etc, etc.

      It doesn't matter to me much, and I sorta understand Google's thinking of not wanting to remove it from beta.

  • great.. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    2 months after i'm out of school
  • I have been using this service for over half a year now, as long as it is integrated in my Firefox toolbar (The way I found out). What is the fuzz about it? Why is it on /.? Actually is it really helpfull to find the 'meaningfull' papers (# of citations) in most subjects as a starting point for research. But it cannot beat to search through, and compare references of papers in a subject.

  • It helped me scoop a NIJ paper (Score:3, Informative)

    by scupper ( 687418 ) * on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:48AM (#13144449) Homepage
    I just used Scholar this morning looking for an abstract from the American Society of Criminology's "CRIMINOLOGY & Public Policy" journal.

    The original abstract:
    "Trajectories of Crime at Places: A Longitudinal Study of Street Segments in the City of Seattle"
    Criminology & Public Policy, American Society of Criminology
    Vol. 42 (2), May 2004, pp.283-322.
    David Weisburd, Shawn Bushway, Cynthia Lum, Sue-Ming Yang

    Yielded this from Google Scholar [google.com]:

    THE CRIMINAL CAREERS OF PLACES: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY
    http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://www.nc jrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/grants/207824.pdf [google.com]
    David Weisburd, Ph.D. Principal Investigator University of Maryland, College Park & The Hebrew University, Jerusalem Cynthia Lum, Ph.D. Project Director Northeastern University, Boston Sue-Ming Yang, M.A. Research Assistant University of Maryland, College Park
    July 31, 2004
    National Institute of Justice, DOJ

    A subsequent NIJ grant funded report based on the abstract I was looking for.
  • We've already heard a lot about Google Scholar right here:

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/15/14472 3 2&from=rss [slashdot.org] Google Scholar sucks because it can't count accurately, and it does a crappy job of searching by date, and it doesn't consider variations on names.

    http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/11/19 24254&tid=217&tid=123&tid=146 [slashdot.org] The American Chemical Society (maker of SciFinder Scholar) sues Google over Google Scholar.

    http://slashdot.org/articles/04/11/18/1317241.s [slashdot.org]

  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by rbarreira ( 836272 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:50AM (#13144464) Homepage
    Google beta launched! New search engine which promises to organized the world's information neatly. You can find it here [archive.org].

  • in related news.. (Score:1, Redundant)

    by ashot ( 599110 )
    Google today also launched World Wide Web Search Beta, which Google claims allows you to search over 8 billion web pages and provides more relevant results based on their new PageRank algorithm.

  • Old news? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Quixote ( 154172 ) * on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:52AM (#13144472) Homepage Journal
    As others have mentioned, this is old news. This begs the question: is there something special going on between Google and Slashdot? In other words, is there some sort of payola involved?? Just like Roland Pipequaille(?), it is strange how even the smallest Google stories make it into Slashdot.

    I think the Slashdot editors/owners should come out and tell us (the paying customers) if this is indeed the case.


    • No, I doubt the conspiracy theory. CowboyNeal is just a little slow. That I believe.

      Dupes happen here almost every day.

      PS- bring back the CowboyNeal option on polls, new polls suck.

    • The practice of hyping up every single event involving Google, or, in the absence of news, slight changes in air pressure.

  • Famous (and not so famous) quotes (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Real Nem ( 793299 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:56AM (#13144485) Homepage

    "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants."
    - Isaac Newton

    "If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders."
    - Hal Abelson

    "In computer science, we stand on each other's feet."
    - Brian Reid

  • Hey dude, that's nothing... (Score:4, Funny)

    by mrRay720 ( 874710 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @12:01PM (#13144504)
    the REAL news is that Google have just released a search engine!

    Anyway, I'm off to try out the new beta of Windows 95...
  • Nice idea, but the very first site I tried told me on my first attempt that I was blocked. Too many requests from my IP address. Sort of a if requests > 0 then block_user.

    Fine, maybe my cable ISP is using a proxy, but it leads me to wonder of these sites which have lived in quiet scholorly isolation until now are up to being Googled.

  • Is this like groups.google.com, which automatically redirects to groups-beta...? If they don't feel they're ready for prime-time, why should anyone be shilling for them to become part of my workflow?

    Back when *I* was a lad, betas were inflicted on small percentages of the final end-user market, not broadly marketed to everyone with 'beta' serving as a mere disclaimer and caveat. Google in particular, seems to have never ending betas of everything. If it's labelled untested, not to be relied upon and subject

  • Katz (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pamri ( 251945 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @12:12PM (#13144556) Homepage
    Dupe or not..It seems Jon Katz's [wikipedia.org] article on slashdot itself [slashdot.org] is cited [google.com].
  • If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.
    -- Hal Abelson

  • unfortunately, not up-2-date (Score:3, Informative)

    by vlad_petric ( 94134 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @12:17PM (#13144573) Homepage
    My very strong impression is that they did a crawling when they started it, and just stayed with that database.

    I'm unable to find stuff published in my field this year with google scholar (including 2 of my papers).

  • Google it.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by duniyadnd ( 901703 )
    Google about Google Scholar to find out when it was released before posting it... remember.. Google Search came out only a week ago, and is still relatively new and can help you find information on the net.

  • It's the Citations, Stupid! (Score:5, Informative)

    by backlonthethird ( 470424 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @12:27PM (#13144622)

    This still doesn't hold a candle to a good university library site. Finding good academic articles is still all about context context context. You need to know what journals you want, what authors aren't crackpots, etc ec. My own university's library system (U of Minnesota), www.lib.umn.edu [umn.edu], has great research guides to help provide that context.

    As an example, A Google Scholar search for Kafka [google.com] doens't have the sort of literary references I'm looking for until the third page. Is it just that scientific articles are more likely the be available on the web?

    One very good thing about Google Scholar is that it specifically searches references. This is an advance, and further work on the engine should be in this direction (I'm thinking a visual web of articles). The first thing you do when you find a halfway decent article is check out its references and then go and grab those, *especially* if more than one article references something. It's often hard to know what the really important watershed articles and books are in a given subject when you're new to it (again with the context). A quick, visual chart or web of articles and the articles they reference would be awesome for figuring that out. Something like their score for web pages but based solely on references. This is already how it works (hits are sorted by the number of articles that have cited them), but it sure would be nice to be able to, say, check articles that fit your search genre and uncheck those that don't. I could then uncheck the scientific articles and watch the literary ones move up on my search.

    Rambling now. Done now

    • *or the user (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mbius ( 890083 )
      Try Franz Kafka [google.com]. I'm guessing anything done by a guy named Kafka in the last fifty years, hence relevant to current research, is not what you're looking for. The priority is to serve the bleeding edge and worry about history eventually.

      It's really great for science, simply for transparent navigation. The convenience over the library system (search title, select journal, login, find year, find volume, find article) or existing frontends (login, select author/title/keyword, worry about syntax, hope what
  • Wouldnt the target crowd for scholar already have access to JSTOR, Academic Search Premier, LexisNexis, ect? All of these have full text, which is much more useful than a citation. I tried using it once or twice, not much good came out of it.
    • I use Google Scholar a lot for chemistry searches, just because it's a helluva lot faster and easier to use than Scifinder Scholar or Beilstein, even though the latter two are a bit more comprehensive. Google's apparently done some sort of arrangement with my university, because I can access fulltext through Scholar searches itself, which is immensely useful.
  • How much of google's offerings aren't in beta?

  • Funny (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Funny how many people in this thread commented on this story without appearing to know that Google Scholar has already been available for ages. Just goes to show that this site main target group is really 13 year old 1337 dudes, as anyone seriously interested in computer science (or, for that matter, any other research subject) uses Google Scholar almost on a daily basis.

    And don't even get me started on the editor not knowing about it either...
  • As much as I love Google, I'm so tired of hearing about every little movement the company makes. They just happen to do good services, it's not like they NEED this constant media coverage when there's more important stuff to check in the headlines.

    Hold on a sec, my "Google" google alerts just made their way into my inbox, time to check..

  • Proper citations (Score:3, Insightful)

    by roffe ( 26714 ) <roffe@extern.uio.no> on Saturday July 23, 2005 @02:21PM (#13145203) Homepage

    And when is scholar.google.com going to support exporting to BibTeX-style citations?

    Huh? Huh? Huh!?

  • Check this one out.

    New directions in cryptography.
    http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/i el5/18/22693/01055638.pdf [ieee.org]

    Is there a list round of the famous pieces yet?

  • When is Google going to add a way for us
    to search in ALL their databases (News, Groups, Scolar, books, etc)???!!!
  • And here I thought I'd never be able to find links to the ACM's portal page asking me to pay grotesque fees to access their papers! Truly this is a great step forward toward the free exchange of information! I for one nibble the knobs of our new Google overlords!

    --grendel drago

  • Full text search save a lot of time! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I am google schoolar + PubMed addict, so my opinion is not objective at all.

    Google schoolar pros:
    * full text search,
    * save a lot of time because it shows a few lines of text surrounding your query,
    * articles at the top have highest number of citations, so I know what is popular/respected publication,
    * in advanced search I can select publications from the last year(s) with not so many citations,
    * each publication has a link listing who cite this publication (some journals do not provide such a list),

    cons:
    *

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