[Web4lib] Which databases can Google Scholar crawl?

[Campbell, James (jmc)]

And this makes sense. When libraries track their holdings, they track a combination of titles and issues. It's not enough to say that you have Brain, you add that you have it from 1996 to the present.  Google knows they're crawling Science Direct (and from the publicity we know it too), but they can't say or don't want to take the trouble to say which Elsevier journals or what years are picked up in each crawl.

We used to complain a lot about aggregators, that their holdings changed constantly, but in fact that seems to be increasingly true of the major journal publishers as well. Journals jump merrily from Oxford to Blackwell to Cambridge to Wiley. Sometimes the backfile stays at the old site, sometimes the new publisher sets up a complete archive (Oxford in particular seems to be using that as a way of wooing journals). Google's policy allows them to avoid all that nuisance.

      - Jim Campbell

      Digital Access Librarian | Librarian for German
      University of Virginia Library | Charlottesville, VA 22904-4112

      513 Alderman | campbell at virginia.edu | 434-924-4985


-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Corey Murata
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 6:04 PM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Which databases can Google Scholar crawl?

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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Web4lib mailing list
>> Web4lib at webjunction.org
>> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>>
>
>
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