Google Scholar in the Academic Library

“STAND ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS” Launched in 2004 Google Scholar (GS) “provides a simple way to

broadly search for scholarly literature” Essentially, GS is a metasearch tool GS claims to help “you identify the most

relevant research across the world of scholarly research”

GS is still in Beta Compared with commercial databases in

terms of content and searchability

WHAT?

According to recent research, the content in Google and GS does not “overlap greatly;” GS does crawl a specific subset of Google material: Books, citations, Word documents, PDF, HTML,

conference proceedings, patents, legal opinions, etc… Google does not actually disclose, specifically,

what is indexed within GS There is no list of resources crawled, and the

frequency of updates is completely unknown Not a lot of full text Links to library holdings using LinkSource

HOW?

No one is really sure about the relevancy algorithm, indexing, or content. We do know that the results are

Relevance ranked (default) Although, you can manipulate the dates to

show the most recent resources

FEATURES

Advanced Search (how you’re searching) Scholar Preferences (what you’re

searching) Categories (broad areas of research) Library Links Cited By Related Articles Web Search Exporting Citations to Bib Managers

BENEFITS

Great tool for verifying partial citations Open access (although not all of its

content is) Like its parent, perfect for quick

answers Works with a platform with which

everyone is already comfortable Can be tied into individual libraries’

catalogs Shows multiple versions of a resource,

at a glance

PROBLEMS & DRAWBACKS

Inaccurate citation analysis & impact of scholarly material

Lack of transparency in content (Apparent) unbalanced subject areas Not very powerful search/lack of search

features (compared with commercial databases)

No definition of categories/subject areas

Google Scholar is already out there. Our job is not to do battle with it, but to teach our students how to use it wisely…

--Badke, 2009

It is a perfectly decent search tool for those who are looking for quick answers and for questions that have little or no impact on clinical excellence…

--Vine, 2006

MOST RESEARCH AGREES…

Google Scholar cannot replace or really be used independently of other, commercial databases (unless the researcher is simply looking for a “quick” answer)

GS, nonetheless, is a valuable tool when used as part of an overall research plan or cadre of research tools

SO, WHAT DO WE TAKE AWAY FROM THIS? Should we include GS in instruction/one-

shots? Why/why not? When do we turn to it on the reference desk? Philosophically, what will it do to users if

they see us using GS, rather than a library database?

How do we answer questions about comparing GS and library databases?

Other thoughts/questions?