1.
Google Scholar – friend or foe?

2.
"isn't it true that only librarians like to search? Everyone else
likes to find".
Tennant, R. (2001) "Digital Libraries- Cross-Database Search: One-Stop Shopping." Library
journal. 15 October. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA170458.html

3.
1. What is Google Scholar?
2. How does Google Scholar work?
3. The “Deep Web”
4. The pros and cons of Google Scholar
5. Using Google Scholar (Google Scholar features)
6. Google Books (previously : Google Book Search)

4.
1. Free and accessible web search engine for scientific
articles and books
2. Indexes scholarly literature across formats and disciplines
3. Released in 2004
4. In 2011 Scholar was removed from the Google main page
5. Includes material from
• Google Books
• Limited publishers websites and platforms
• The general Google index (e.g. Articles from authors
personal websites)
• Bibliographies of publications in Google Scholar
(indicated by [CITATION])
• University repositories
• Preprint and working archives (e.g. ArXiv, Repec and
NBER)
• Patents and USA Courts of law

5.
6. What is excluded?
• Journals and ebooks from publishers who do not co-
operate with GS
• Journals and some books only available in print
• Much of the material found in the “Deep Web”
7. Can be used for Citation Analysis : but beware!
8. Authors can create a profile to establish your citation data
and h-index. Again beware: you can only add publications
which are already on Google Scholar

6.
• http://www.google.com/intl/en/scholar/about.html
• http://scholar.google.co.za/intl/en/scholar/about.html

7.
Needs affiliation to an institution:
• Automatic when you are on Campus
• Off Campus login
• Setup in Google Scholar settings

8.
http://www.juanico.co.il/main%20frame%20-%20english/issues/information%20systems.ht

9.
http://www.kn.att.com/wired/21stcent/wversus.html

10.
Source: http://www.upworthy.com/

11.
• Free (searching)
• Articles in non-peer reviewed journals
• Articles from conference proceedings
• Also covers chapters in books
• Indexes digital repositories
• Scholar metrics : top 100 publications
• Allows easy access to published articles compared with
other commercial databases (Google-like interface)

12.
1. Only searches a fraction of published scholarly data
2. Duplication leads to erroneous citation counts
3. Doesn’t deal well with structured and tagged scholarly
documents resulting in inaccurate and nonsensical data
4. Only 2 sorts (Relevance and Date)
5. Coverage is dubious (what is included?)
6. Many subscription databases are not included
7. No prepublication data (not preprints)
8. Not able to refine results
9. Relevance ranking heavily relies on the number of
citation counts

13.
• Navigation of the start page
• Navigation of the results page

14.
• My Library
• My Citations
• Alerts
• Metrics
• Settings
• Search box options

15.
• Navigation of the start page
• Navigation of the results page

16.
Operators and wildcards
• “south africa” – exact phrase (use quotation marks /
inverted commas)
• Boolean searching including +, -, AND, OR, AND NOT
• e.g. “south africa” AND art AND apartheid
• e.g. apartheid NOT “south africa”
• DOES NOT support wild card searching for word varieties
beginning with a stem e.g. “south*” will not give you
“southern”, southwest” etc.

17.
Types of results:
Clickable title (info is available on line – either full text or
abstract)
[CITATION] means thet there is no online version but you are
able to view the papers that cited the work.
[BOOK] with a clickable title – version is online
[BOOK] without a clickable title – version is not online but
Google Scholar gives you a “Library Link” to find library with a
hard copy

18.
• Limiting by date
• Sorts : Relevance and Date
• Create Alert
• Settings and “My Citations” also accessible from Search
page (Down arrow at the top)
• Results:
• Cited by
• Related articles
• Cite
• All versions
• More …
• Cached

19.
“We just feel that this is part of our core mission. There is
fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search,
what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a web site.”
Sergey Brin Quoted in Nunberg, Geoffrey. “Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for
Scholars. The Chronicle Review. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 31 Aug.
2009.

20.
• Libraries are “partners in crime”
• Bad metadata
• Automatic indexing of the full text results in errors
• Use of BISAC for subject headings : not helpful
• Google Play (was Android Market)
• Different views :
• Full view
• Limited
• Snippet
• No preview available
• Advanced search
• Find in a library
• Search within the book
• About this book
• Google Play (was Android Market)