Péter Jacsó reviews Google Scholar

[george at library.caltech.edu]

[Forwarding from Open Access News.  This is an extensive review and quite eye-opening.  -- George]

Péter Jacsó reviews Google Scholar <http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/reference/peter/dec.htm#googlescholar>  in the December issue of Péter's Reference Shelf <http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/reference/peter/dec.htm> . Excerpt: 'Google Scholar has enormous gaps in its coverage of publishers' archives, and implicitly in the direct links to the full-text documents therein. The citedness scores of documents displayed in the results lists have great potential for choosing the most promising articles and books on a subject, but they often are inflated. The prominent display of the citedness scores could help the scholars and practitioners whose libraries don't have access to the best citation-based systems, such as Web of Science <http://www.galegroup.com/servlet/HTMLFileServlet?imprint=9999&region=7&fileName=reference/archive/200408/webscience.html>  and Scopus <http://www.galegroup.com/servlet/HTMLFileServlet?imprint=9999&region=7&fileName=reference/archive/200409/scopus.html> , or to the smartest implementations of citation-enhanced abstracting indexing databases, like some on CSA and EBSCO. Google should take a page from the best open-access services and repositories, such as CiteBase, Research Index and RePEc/LogEc <http://logec.hhs.se/about.htm> , which handle citing and cited references and citedness scores <http://www2.hawaii.edu/~jacso/Jacso-citedness.pdf>  much better than Google Scholar. Google's crawlers, which many scholarly publishers and preprint servers let in to their archives for this project, picked up information for many redundant and irrelevant pages and ignored a few million full-text scholarly papers and/or their citation/abstract records. With the exception of the authors' name field, Google treated the items in the huge archives as any of the zillions of unstructured pages on the Web. Google Scholar needs much refinement in collecting, filtering, processing and presenting this valuable data....I promise that I will write a hagiographic review about Google Scholar when it is done, and done well.' 
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Posted by Peter Suber to Open Access News <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_12_05_fosblogarchive.html#110243497986886616>  at 12/7/2004 10:26:19 AM