[Web4lib] Which databases can Google Scholar crawl?

[Corey Murata]

Here's Acharya's answer from a 2006 interview 
(http://www.google.com/librariancenter/articles/0612_01.html):

*************
TH: Why don't you provide a list of journals and/or publishers included 
in Google Scholar? Without such information, it's hard for librarians to 
provide guidance to users about how or when to use Google Scholar.

AA: Since we automatically extract citations from articles, we cover a 
wide range of journals and publishers, including even articles that are 
not yet online. While this approach allows us to include popular 
articles from all sources, it makes it difficult to create a succinct 
description of coverage. For example, while we include Einstein's 
articles from 1905 (the "miracle year" in which he published seminal 
articles on special relativity, matter and energy equivalence, Brownian 
motion and the photoelectric effect), we don't yet include all articles 
published in that year.

That said, I'm not quite sure that a coverage description, if available, 
would help provide guidance about how or when to use Google Scholar. In 
general, this is hard to do when considering large search indices with 
broad coverage. For example, the notes and comparisons I have seen about 
other large scholarly search indices (for which detailed coverage 
information is already available) provide little guidance about when to 
use each of them, and instead recommend searching all of them.
**********

Cm
-- 
Corey Murata
Collection Assessment Projects Librarian
Business Computer-based Services Librarian
University of Washington
Box 353224
Seattle, WA 98195
(206) 543-4360
murata at u.washington.edu


Roy Tennant wrote:
> Yes. I have personally and directly asked Anurag Acharya and got nowhere. He
> suggested that we try to determine coverage by throwing searches at it.
> Roy
>
>
> On 2/19/08 2:32 PM, "Bill Drew" <dreww at tc3.edu> wrote:
>
>   
>> Has anyone approached Google asking for this information?
>>
>> Bill Drew
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>