Web Search–Google
Source: The Harvard Crimson
More Comments About Google Scholar
The Harvard Crimson offers a look at Google Scholar today. A couple of comments:
+”Cheryl M. LaGuardia, head of instructional services for Harvard College libraries, said that Scholar has the potential for success, but she sees some limitations. ‘I don’t think it will replace the resources available in the library,’ LaGuardia said. ‘It’s still got a long way to go, but there’s promise.’”
++ As we pointed out last week, we continue to find lots of material in Google Scholar that’s not “scholarly.” Be careful.
+”LaGuardia said current library resources, like JSTOR (a subscription service to which University affiliates are granted access), give users access to a wide range of free articles that users of Google Search have to pay for.”
++ LaGuardia is correct; we made a similar comment last week. Btw, I enjoyed seeing this quote from Google Scholar developer, Anurag Acharya, in Barbara Quint’s article yesterday: “So many people do not know that they have access through institutional subscriptions.” Yep. Once again, a clear example of why both library and database vendor marketing need to improve. People can’t use what they don’t know about.
+ We’ve read (even before the launch of Google Scholar) about fee-based database interfaces being difficult to use as compared to Google. In some cases, this might be accurate. However, databases from fee-based vendors have steadily improved in ease of use during the past few years — a necessary thing, considering how much more end-user searching is being done these days. We’ve often wondered if people who diss these tools (for this reason) have used them in the past few years. Are they as easy to use as Google? No, in many cases, they’re not. However, with a small (and we mean very small) amount of training, even a casual searcher will find that these potentially more powerful retrieval tools can save plenty of time and generate better results. Yes, a little learning can go a long. In many cases, the challenge is getting an audience.
++ We see a relationship here to the fact that many searchers do not want to use (or even look at) engines other than Google because they believe the interfaces are too complex. The last time we looked at Yahoo’s streamlined interface or Teoma, we felt they were just as straightforward as Google.
+ “Professor of Psychology Marc D. Hauser said he briefly used Scholar and was encouraged by what he saw. ‘It’s an incredibly useful source because it takes into account a number of sources,’ he said.”
++ This quote reads like a wake-up call for federated/metasearch technologies WHERE the library and librarians can create a single user interface to a variety of sources (open web, deep web, fee-based, and locally created info).
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A couple of additional comments and clarifications about our Google Scholar post from last Thursday. Thanks for your interest. Also, we appreciate ResourceShelf’s Steven Cohen for his assistance in getting all of this together.
++ In our post last week we could have been clearer about searching Google Scholar with the author: syntax.
Steven writes, “While it is true that one can search the database by abbreviated author name (eg “Cohen S”), at this time there is only one syntax that Google Scholar has available — the “author” syntax. The folks at Google recommend that you only use the last name of the author when using that syntax (eg. author:cohen), as using it another way will come up with sometimes poor (that is, erratic) results (e.g., author:cohen j).”
+ About Google Scholar crawling the full text from certain publisher sites — here’s what a Google spokesperson told us today: “…where we have permission to crawl a doc we will do so, but will only show an abstract.”
+ Finally, Steven adds this comment:
++ GS needs to define “scholarly” better. For fun, I put my name into the database and the two links that relate to me were my book and a post to Library Juice made in 2001. Definitely not a scholarly post. More stringent rules should be in place before I would call it a scholarly engine. If anyone can put a PDF version of a paper they wrote in college online and GS picks it up as “scholarly,” there is something wrong. Librarians do a much better job at collection development.

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