A new article at the German Goethe-Institut website…

“The ‘universal’ library of the American search engine company Google, on the other hand, has no primary significance for the desirable exchange of scientific and scholarly information”

/Cough/

A casual search turns up what sounds like something of a rebuttal: “Google Scholar versus PubMed in Locating Primary Literature to Answer Drug-Related Questions” (March 2009)…

“No significant differences were identified in the number of target primary literature articles located between databases. PubMed searches yielded fewer total citations than Google Scholar results…”

And another: “Google Scholar Search Performance: Comparative Recall and Precision” (January 2009)…

“a comparative evaluation of Google Scholar and 11 other bibliographic databases (Academic Search Elite, AgeLine, ArticleFirst, EconLit, GEOBASE, MEDLINE, PAIS International, POPLINE, Social Sciences Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, and SocINDEX), focusing on search performance within the multidisciplinary field of later-life migration. The results of simple keyword searches are evaluated with reference to a set of 155 relevant articles identified in advance. In terms of both recall and precision, Google Scholar performs better than most of the subscription databases. This finding, based on a rigorous evaluation procedure…”

And of course this recent article, which I blogged a few days ago: “How Scholarly is Google Scholar? A Comparison to Library Databases” (PDF pre-print paper for College & Research Libraries journal, accepted 30th June 2008)…

“We found that Google Scholar is, on average, 17.6% more scholarly than materials found only in library databases and that there is no statistically significant difference between the scholarliness of materials found in Google Scholar across disciplines.”