Google Scholar: on the shoulders of a giant
Google Scholar is a specialized version of Google for academic documents that uses a variant of PageRank to sort the documents and its own citation index to measure the impact of each piece of material.
Abstract
Google Scholar is a specialized version of Google for academic documents. Through a massive use of crawlers and harvesters, it extracts metadata from the most relevant and recognized scientific sources across the web, and is one of the most up-to-date and exhaustive scientific information services on the web. Supported by Google technology, it uses a variant of PageRank to sort the documents and its own citation index to measure the impact of each piece of material. In addition to a main search page, it recently incorporated two new services: Google Scholar Citations (author profiles) and Google Scholar Metrics (journals). Its weaknesses are its opaque results, a poor search interface and the unstructured design of its new applications.