As T.S.Mahadevan recently pointed out on the BOAI Forum, what those who are
searching for open archive and other scholarly literature really want is a
single website where they can search the entire set of such literature.
Google is already accounting for a significant portion of the hits on the
OA journal articles I monitor. Might Google Scholar be that website?
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Google Scholar (beta version online at
http://scholar.google.com) restricts
Google searches to scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers,
theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all fields
of research, and finds articles from a wide variety of academic publishers,
professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as
scholarly articles available across the web. Google Scholar ranks search
results by their relevance to the query, so the most useful references
should appear at the top of the page. The relevance ranking takes into
account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the
publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited
in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and
extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the
documents they refer to are not online. This means that search results may
include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in
books or other offline publications. [Parts of this description taken
directly from
http://scholar.google.com/scholar/about.html#about.]
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Tom Walker
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Thomas J. Walker
Department of Entomology & Nematology
PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive)
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620
E-mail: tjw_at_ufl.edu (or tjwalker_at_ifas.ufl.edu)
FAX: (352)392-0190
Web:
http://tjwalker.ifas.ufl.edu
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Received on Wed Feb 16 2005 - 14:16:32 GMT