According to a posting at TechCrunch, Google Scholar was down ~32% in 2007. Many of us use Google Scholar to find publications, but as a life scientist, my first stop continues to remain PubMed. I suspect that people in other sciences have their own favorite sources. To be successful, Scholar needs to be different and move beyond it’s current rather dry interface. Some time ago, I had proposed a Plus Box for Google Scholar. IMO to be really successful, Google has to go beyond just peer reviewed literature. I have been unable to get in touch with the Scholar folks, so if anyone who has access can make some suggestions to them, it would be much appreciated.
I am including a poll. If you could rationalize your vote in the comments it would be much appreciated.
You might be able to get in touch with some of the developers from the Google Scholar group. One more thing I think Google scholar needs is the ability to sort results based on # of citations. That would be very simple to implement, but so far they have yet to include it.
The problem with Google Scholar, as I told them when it came out, is that it needs to know how to handle names in the form Firstname M. Lastname, F.M. Lastname, and Lastname, F.M.
A search for Lastname, F. should return results for Frank Lastname and Frederick Lastname and everybody else with an F starting their first name. Likewise, a search for Firstname Lastname should return results for F. Lastname.
Currently, it can't do this because it doesn't have a operator for firstname or lastname or initials, only for name. This makes it all but useless for academic purposes, where authorship is a major search criteria. The only time I actually use it is when I'm using a index, like ISI "Walled Garden" of Knowledge which doesn't have links to pubmed, display DOIs, or give any other links to non-ISI content. The shortest path to the pubmed entry is sometimes to select the article title and do a right-click google search.
/happy new year //hope you had a good holiday season
Google Scholar is down
I am including a poll. If you could rationalize your vote in the comments it would be much appreciated.
Technorati Tags: Google Scholar, Literature Search