GOOGLE SCHOLAR WEBSITE

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Abstract

Researchers, academics, students and librarians are facing an increasingly ardent task of searching through multiple sources to find relevant information. Google Scholar provides a search engine for peer-reviewed papers, theses, abstracts, articles from various publishers, universities and other scholarly organizations. Similar to Google web search, Google Scholar provides the advantage of searching all available scholarly work from one single interface. The search results are ranked on several criteria including full text of the article, author, publication and the number of citations for each article. Google scholar offers a wide coverage of topics, but is particularly strong in science and medicine. The company has entered into agreement with open source publishers and hosting services to provide access to text content to Google crawlers. Like its search counterpart, Google Scholar provides a simple and easyto-use search interface. The advanced search provides various options to narrow down the search by author, publication date and subject areas – as well as usage of boolean operators. The search results in Scholar usually provide a link to the abstract of the article and a pay-per-view option for accessing the full text from commercial publications. Google Scholar does have some weaknesses. Vine has pointed out that Google Scholar was a year behind PubMed and that Scholar search is based on partial PubMed dataset provided to Google by National Library of Medicine.1 Jasco’s extensive critique and review of Google Scholar in 2004 showed that far fewer documents were found when compared with the native search interface of the publishers.2 A second review by Jasco in 2005 discussed inadequacies in Scholar’s advanced search options and noted a variation in citedness scores when compared with other search engines.3 In another independent review conducted by Notess in 2005, Google Scholar returned less results compared with PubMed and Scirus (an online free web search launched by Elsevier).4 The reviewers have also noted a lack of transparency from Google about the publishers and content providers that are included in Google Scholar. Based on present published work and my personal experience the three most important criteria for any scholarly work search are currency of content, search options and search result presentation. Currency of content is important to ensure that the results contain most up-to-date information. Search options provide a way to filter the results especially when the result set is large. The third criterion about search result presentation includes several factors, such as search result ranking, ability to sort the results and export/ save functionality. To test the currency of content, I used the keyword search for ‘Varicella Zoster’ in PubMed, which resulted in 5960 articles and 885 reviews. The latest article in the search results was titled ‘Seroprevalence of varicella zoster virus infections in Colombo District, Sri Lanka’ and was published in Indian Journal of Medicine in March 2007. The advanced search using the same keyword in Google Scholar could not find the same article. Similar results were observed using other keywords. The primary search option in Google Scholar is a single text entry window, similar to its web search. The search help section provides some information on the search syntax such as using (author: ‘name’) that can help narrow down the search from the primary search. The advanced search options are also limited only to search keyword, publication, author, date and subject area. The publication keyword syntax like ‘J Biol Chem’ used by Google Scholar can also be a source of confusion and can result in incorrect results. My search for articles from ‘ANZ J Surg’ between 2000 and 2003 showed only 198 results compared with search for articles from ‘ANZ Journal of Surgery’ for the same period that returned 2850 results. The final criterion for evaluation is the search result presentation. The search results presented by Google Scholar are grouped and ranked based on various factors, including the citedness score using a Google search algorithm. Jasco’s comparison of Scholar with other search engines indicates that the Google Scholar’s citation rates may be the most inaccurate.3 Furthermore, there are no options in Google Scholar to export the search results into different formats or save them for later use. Google Scholar provides a very fast and easy search interface for scholarly publication search. However, it does have deficiencies in currency of content, search options and search results presentation. So in conclusion, Google Scholar is useful as a fast and inexpensive search interface for clinicians and libraries that do not have subscriptions to Web of Science or Scopus.