A new article evaluating Google Scholar (May 2009), written for those running businesses, by university librarian William Badke.
Google Scholar and the Researcher
04 Thursday Jun 2009
Posted in Academic search
Category Archives: Academic search
Undesirables
01 Monday Jun 2009
Posted in Academic search, Open Access publishing
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.”
How scholarly is Google Scholar?
30 Saturday May 2009
Posted in Academic search
“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.”
Scholarly worth was apparently judged by “subject-specialist reference librarians” rather than by active research scholars. I’m not sure if results from Google Book Search (which pop up in Google Scholar) were counted, or if it was only the articles that were evaluated — the word “book” occurs only once in the article. Of course, what really counts is if a user can get access to the article they want. If not then, for most students, the article might as well have been locked in a trunk and thown in the ocean.
This encouraging 2008 research should be balanced against some 2007 findings from Germany (Philipp Mayr and Anne-Kathrin Walter, “An Exploratory Study of Google Scholar“), which found some weaknesses in the up-to-dateness of Google Scholar results, and commented on…
“weaknesses in the accessibility of Open Access content”.
… this last probably due (I would guess) to the paucity of easily-accessible metadata, and the often awkward and haphazard ways in which such journals archive their articles (hence the need for a hand-made solution such as JURN).
Going beyond
27 Wednesday May 2009
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
This looks interesting, if rather expensive. Third Bloomsbury Conference on E-Publishing and E-Publications: “Beyond Books and Journals”. 25th – 26th June 2009, London.
And sadly it seems that the “Designs on eLearning: Learning and Teaching with Technology in Art, Design and Communication” conference has definitely “gone beyond”. To the grave, in fact. Due to have been held in London in early Sept 2009, it has now been cancelled.
art&education papers database
27 Wednesday May 2009
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
Always nice to see a new art history full-text papers archive underway…
In order to build the art&education papers database, we are now calling for either new or already existing (published or unpublished, recent or older) scholarly articles from around the world. Texts should be comprehensive, research-based articles focusing on topics in 20th century and contemporary art. Texts may be culled from conference papers, seminar papers, dissertation chapters, etc. We ask that you submit pieces anywhere from 2,000 words to approximately 10,000 words and include a 100 word abstract and full contact information (or publication information for previously published texts). All submissions will be considered for publication on the website. Please submit articles by email to papers@artandeducation.net
London event on ejournals, 1st July 09
22 Friday May 2009
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
“The e-journals revolution: how the use of scholarly journals is shaping research” is a forthcoming consultation and feedback event in London, being held as a follow-up to the recent publication of the RIN report on ejournals (and no doubt also informed by the related Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World report)…
“Wednesday 1st July 09. Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London. W1G 0AE. This free RIN event will look at the findings of the E-journals: their use, value and impact report, […] The event aims to spark a debate on these issues and to inform phase 2 of this RIN study. Aimed at scholarly publishers, university librarians, higher education policy makers and researchers, this event will offer fresh insights on the use and value of e-journals and provide a networking opportunity for delegates…”
Winder on academic search
17 Friday Apr 2009
Posted in Academic search
A detailed Information World Review article by the well-known Davey Winder, evaluating various academic search options from the point-of-view of a techie/journalist rather than a librarian. It’s a year old now, and seems to ignore the needs of the arts & humanities, but is still a useful everyman overview…
“One point often overlooked by many amateur researchers is that while the searching at IngentaConnect and Google Scholar may well be free, the hits generated often involve payment of some kind to access.”
JURN and diacritics/Chinese/Japanese
05 Thursday Feb 2009
Posted in Academic search, JURN metrics, My general observations
I’m trying to fix a problem with JURN returning 
into the search box after a search, when it should show 
.
being the “raw” HTML codes for those Chinese characters.
Tweaking the supplied code snippet from UTF-8 to iso-8859-1 seems to cure it. But then that results in nothing being returned to the search box at all, even for English queries. Which is obviously a non-starter, since I’m not going to cripple JURN in English.
It seems the bug results from a combination of Google’s remote “show_afs_search.js” javascript file (which I can’t change), and my showing the results on the same page as the search box (i.e.: the “iframe hosting option”). The language encoding for the search terms is getting stripped out, somewhere in the loop back to the search-box.
Other people’s Custom Search Engines seem to handle the problem, but only by displaying the results on a new second page. I may have to look into having a second interface for non-English users, showing the results on a second page, when JURN makes the move to its own domain. Or you can just use the “raw” Google page for JURN.
Unless someone can offer a solution? But I’ve searched the support forums with no result. It seems it may well be a genuine bug with the “iframe hosting option”. The same bug also causes JURN to refuse non-English accents (i.e.: diacritics) on search terms. So “pate” will work and will find “pate” and “pâté”, — but “pâté” on its own won’t be accepted as a valid search term.