Heather and others: The date search can be misleading and generally
inaccurate from my experience with Google Scholar. Blackwell's journals
for example, were indexed by GS before they were in CINAHL when I
checked Blackwell's nursing journals and their most recent issues
against Google Scholar content. Ebsco has introduced a "pre cinhal" to
speed up the process of identification of nursing content. I didn't
compare GS to "Pre-CINAHL" but that would be a good way to check
timeliness of coverage in GS.
IN GS several publishers and aggregators were indexed very quickly in
what I looked at in December. 100% as far as I could tell, of Extenza
content was indexed, for example, and I noted particularly rapid
indexing of a significant percentage but not all Ingenta content.
The other area where currency of coverage seems pretty good is the 35
some
CrossRef publishers working with Google. For Open Access, the links to
"other" versions was particularly useful, as I found for some journal
titles and in some subject fields, significant portions of the content
was also available on individual or institutional servers. Bringing the
original article together with the archived versions is a unique service
that for secondary searching (i.e. if your local resources fail to
provide access to the article you need) is a powerful tool.
Chuck Hamaker
Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical Services
Atkins Library
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223
phone 704 687-2825
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On
Behalf Of Heather Morrison
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 12:48 PM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: Google Scholar
With all the emphasis on immediate open access, I'm wondering - how up
to date is google scholar?
A quick search by publication year yields the following:
2001: 62,000 items
2002: 68,600 items
2003: 63,700 items
2004: 8,060 items
While it is possible that 2004 statistics will not be complete due to
publishing delays, this does suggest to me that there is a delay in
google scholar harvesting - whether of open access or
subscription-based resources, or both, is hard to say of course. I do
think this data suggests that if there is one place to look for OA
materials at the moment, it is not google scholar.
My own searching confirms this suspicion - I am finding that if a
needed item is not found in google scholar, then an open access copy
may well still be found through a regular web search.
hope this helps,
Heather Morrison
On 16-Feb-05, at 6:16 AM, Thomas Walker wrote:
> 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?
>
> =======
>
> 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.]
>
> =======
>
> Tom Walker
>
>
>
> ============================================
> 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
> ============================================
>
Heather G. Morrison
Project Coordinator
BC Electronic Library Network
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Phone: 604-268-7001
Fax: 604-291-3023
Email: heatherm_at_eln.bc.ca
Web:
http://www.eln.bc.ca
Received on Wed Feb 16 2005 - 19:02:11 GMT