Proposing a “Plus Box” for Google Scholar

I suspect many of the readers of this blog are regular users of Google Scholar. Currently, Google Scholar has a focus on peer-reviewed published literature, the benchmark for scholarly work.

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

… and what are the key features (emphasis theirs)?

• Search diverse sources from one convenient place
• Find papers, abstracts and citations
• Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web
• Learn about key papers in any area of research

Let’s take a look at the state of science today. The publication is still the central source of scientific information; the most reliable and for good reason. Most scientists still focus their efforts on papers and the reputation of the journals they publish in. However, while the publication still has a central role, the sources of relevant scientific information are changing as we speak.

This also brings together three main issues with scientific information

1. Source. While the publication, conference abstracts, etc continue to be the primary source of relevant scientific information, the fast growing open notebook science movement adds another highly relevant source of scientific information. To this you can add personal home pages, blogs, wikis, various databases of information, institutional pages (there are some great pages on systems biology on the ISB website), etc
2. Relevance. To an extent this might be the most interesting challenge. What constitutes scientific relevance? Google Scholar has its own ranking system. We have impact factors, which in my opinion are likely to have a short shelf life. When you start marketing your publication based on its impact factor, something gets lost in translation. Plus impact factor has limited context. I actually think that the kind of work being done by Carl Bergstrom is the future of scientific relevance. Since I want to spend more time on this, I will get back to it in a follow up post. But to cut a long story short, relevance needs a different focus;the emphasis should not be on total citations, but about taking advantage of citation networks and looking beyond just publications.
3. Access. I’ve written about the role of research libraries. I’ve also written about open science rather extensively. To me access to scientific information is critical. As science goes increasingly virtual and global, using Creative Commons, or other forms of open access are critical.

So what does this have to do with Google Scholar? Well, if we assume that Google Scholar is a means to search across scholarly literature, then why limit it to the peer-reviewed publication? Also, how should Google Scholar provide information to the end user? I actually think Google should talk to Carl Bergstrom. With Google’s resources, I have a feeling Carl can do wonders with his work, which not only has a great theoretical foundation, but also phenomenal presentation. The second thing that Scholar should do is move to a Plus Box approach. For the uninitiated, the Plus Box adds a “+” symbol to Google searches, which you can click on to see the additional rich data expand below the original search result. Using this approach, Scholar can add a lot of value to the existing relatively dry offering

1. Provide links to peer-reviewed literature and mark them as such. They should further expand on that by providing information about other material linking to the literature (perhaps linking out to the relevant Postgenomic cluster)
2. Add multimedia links. For example links to a relevant podcast from Nature Podcasts, or videos from SciVee, JoVE or Bioscreencast
3. Specifically link to blog posts, general science magazines, etc.

By using such an approach, not only would Google identify the definitive scientific literature, but other sources of related information, which might provide a richer picture about the scientific question people might be interested in.

In the follow up to this post, I will discuss Carl Bergstrom’s work on the the network of scientific information, probably sometime tomorrow.

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