[WEB4LIB] an oddity of Google Scholar

[Dan Robinson]

I don't think this is an 'oddity' at all, since you're dealing with web spiders and automatic indexing and retrieval. No person is verifying anything. In the first entry there is a link to the 19 papers in Scholar that cited the article. If the spiders find the original article on the web, it should appear in the search. If the spiders don't find the article, or are blocked from retrieving it for processing, it won't be there. 


Dan Robinson
drobinson at hwwilson.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Karen Kohn [mailto:kkohn at abramsoncenter.org]
> Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 2:06 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list
> Subject: [WEB4LIB] an oddity of Google Scholar
> 
> 
> I just had a strange experience with Google Scholar.  I'm 
> trying to verify a citation for an article by E.M. Foster 
> called "An illustration of the use of instrumental 
> variables..."  I actually have the whole citation in front of 
> me, but it's unverified (comes from the references section of 
> a published article, and those can often contain mistakes).  
> So I searched Google Scholar (see the results here:
> <http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=author%3Afoster+
> AND+%22illustration+of+the+use%22&btnG=Search>) and it came up 
> right away... BUT there is noplace I can click to see the 
> full citation,  I can tell from the hits page that they found 
> this cite in other people's bibliographies and have also not 
> verified it, but why can't they give me the whole thing?  It 
> kind of looks like an oversight to me.  I have mixed feelings 
> about the fact that Google Scholar includes cites they found 
> cited by other people, when these have not been verified in 
> databases or the journal homepage (on one hand it increases 
> what is available on Google Scholar, but I'd say the chances 
> of a mistake in the references section of an article are very 
> high!), but if they are going to include them why not include 
> them in full?
> 
> Karen Kohn, Assistant Librarian
>