2. 1. What is Google Scholar?
2. The “Deep Web”
3. How does Google Scholar work?
4. The pros and cons of Google Scholar
5. Using Google Scholar
6. Google Books
3. “I want to make Google Scholar the one place to go
for scholarly information across all disciplines.”
Anurag Acharya
5. • Free and accessible web search engine for scientific
articles and books
• Information from journal publishers, university
repositories, and other websites that it has identified as
scholarly.
• Google Scholar (2014) had 99.3 million documents,
which is, approximately, 87% of the total number of
scholarly documents found on the web.*
* Khabsa, M. & Giles, C. 2014. The number of scholarly documents on the
public web. Plos One, 9(5): e93949.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0093949
7. Also includes material from :
• Google Books
• The general Google index (e.g. articles from authors
personal websites)
• Bibliographies of publications in Google Scholar
(indicated by [CITATION])
• Patents and USA Courts of law
8. • What is excluded?
• Journals and some books only available in print
• Journals and ebooks from publishers who do not co-
operate with Google Scholar
• Material found in the “Deep Web”
15. Needs affiliation to an institution:
• Automatic when you are on Campus
• Off Campus login
• Setup in Google Scholar settings (if not already done)
20. • Free (searching)
• Articles in non-peer reviewed journals
• Articles from conference proceedings
• Also covers chapters in books
• Indexes digital repositories
• Scholar metrics : top publications in subject fields
• Allows easy access to published articles compared with
other commercial databases (Google-like interface)
• Book coverage (via Google Books)
• Access to grey literature
21. • Coverage is dubious (what is included?)
• Does not search all published scholarly data
• Duplication leads to erroneous citation counts
• Relevance ranking heavily relies on the number of
citation counts
• Only 2 sorts (Relevance and Date)
• Many subscription databases are not included
• Poor Boolean searching
• Lack of advanced searching and refine options
• Doesn’t deal well with structured and tagged scholarly
documents resulting in inaccurate and nonsensical
data
22. Login, Microwave Fixation Versus Formalin Fixation. "of
Surgical and Autopsy Tissue." American Journal of Medical
Technology, vol. rr 435 (1978): 437.
Login, M. F. V. F. F. (1978). of Surgical and Autopsy
Tissue. American Journal of Medical Technology, vol.
rr, 435, 437.
Login, G.R. 1978. Microwave fixation versus formalin
fixation of surgical and autopsy tissue. American journal of
medical technology. 44(5):435-7.
24. Refine, U. I. "Developing a Task UI That Uses
Transient Data." Framework: Task UI Guide: 94.
31. Jasco, Peter. 2010. Metadata mega mess in Google
Scholar. Online Information Review. 34, 175-191.
44. Other Citation Analysis* tools :
1. Web of Science
2. Scopus
* H- Index or Hirsch-index
scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations
that they have received in other publications
45. • Different databases (Web of Science, Scopus and
Google Scholar) have different H indexes for the
same author
• H index differs between disciplines (Space science
and physics have the highest, and computer science,
social science and multidisciplinary with the lowest)
46. Numerous criticisms of the H index:
• h-index does not account for the number of authors
of a paper
• h-index discards the information contained in author
placement in the authors' list, which in some
scientific fields is significant
• Scientists with a short career are at an inherent
disadvantage
• h-index gives books the same count as articles (some
fields are more book-oriented such as the
humanities)
52. • Scholar Metrics currently ONLY cover articles
published between 2009 and 2013
60. 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.
61. Search vocabulary
Google uses free text (no thesaurus or subject headings -
except books)
“hay fever” VS “allergic rhinitis”
Could use ‘“hay fever” OR “allergic rhinitis”’
62. • Navigation of the start page
• Navigation of the results page
63. 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
[HTML] from tandfonline.com SFX@UCT
64. • Limiting by date
• Sorts : Relevance and Date
• Create Alert
• Settings and “My Citations” also accessible from Search
page (Down arrow at the top right next to “My citations”)
• Results:
• Cited by
• Related articles
• Cite
• All versions
• More …
70. “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.
71. • Libraries are “partners in crime”
• Bad metadata
• Automatic indexing of the full text results in errors
• Use of BISAC for subject headings : not helpful
72. • 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)
82. “Isn't it true that only librarians like to search?
Everyone else likes to find". [1]
“Finding is easy...” “…but reading is hard.” [2]
Can Google Scholar meet this "read faster" challenge?
1. Tennant, R. 2001. Digital Libraries- Cross-Database Search: One-Stop Shopping. Library journal. 15
October. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA170458.html
2. Sack, J. 2014. Helping Researchers See Farther Faster.
http://googlescholar.blogspot.com/2014/09/10th-anniversary-series-helping.html
Editor's Notes
Schoogle (skoogle) Schoogling
Released in 2004
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. (Isaac Newton)
A nod to the scholars who have contributed to their fields over the centuries, providing the foundation for new intellectual achievements.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Scholar
This picture is derived from Greek mythology, where the blind giant Orion carried his servant Cedalion on his shoulders.
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. (Isaac Newton)
The attribution to Bernard is due to John of Salisbury. In 1159, John wrote in his Metalogicon. Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to [puny] dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.
It has been described as a "blended" resource
“plug-in-the-keyword-and-hope-for-the-best” tools like Google Scholar are poor choices for serious search questions, such as clinical queries, bibliographic reviews, comprehensive literature searches, or other questions that require a more sophisticated approach.
Grey literature is generally defined as academic literature that is not formally published. It is an expanding field in library and information science that deals with the supply and demand side of publications not controlled by commercial publishing.
Examples of grey literature include patents, technical reports from government agencies or scientific research groups, working papers from research groups or committees, white papers, and preprints.
“plug-in-the-keyword-and-hope-for-the-best” tools like Google Scholar are poor choices for serious search questions, such as clinical queries, bibliographic reviews, comprehensive literature searches, or other questions that require a more sophisticated approach.
The citation counts in Scopis and Web of Science are almost always lower than Google Scholar. The erroneous citation counts are futher compounded by the inclusion of Google Books in Google Scholar. If you are interested there is a Librarianship professor who writes extensively about the pitfalls of Google Scholar indexing, his name is Peter Jasco
Uses artificial intelligence to unstring and index data. GS does not use the perfectly good Metadata offered to it by publishers and libraries. False Author names like “SUBSCRIBE”. Human indexing is best.
Relevance based on number of citations : Because of this ranking using citation counts, Google has been accused of strengthening the “Matthew effect” where highly cited papers appear in top positions gaining even more citations.
Google doesn’t publish a list of journals crawled. Also doesn’t tell us how often the database is updated. So impossible to ascertain how exhaustive or current Google Scholar searches are.
Matthew effect “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer”
Uses artificial intelligence to unstring and index data. GS does not use the perfectly good Metadata offered to it by publishers and libraries. False Author names like “SUBSCRIBE”
You will get better results and coverage if you use the multiple library databases. Human indexing is best.
Entry from an Ebsco subject database (Art and Architecture Complete)
The same search in Google Scholar
Google Scolar bad at subject searching where you wat to specify TOPIC names
For much of this functionality you will need to be signed onto Google or Google Scholar (My Library, My citations, Alerts ) Setting will only be saved for the session duration if not signed in
Scholar Library allows you to save your citations in the Library
It is simple as clicking the SAVE link under the citation.
From this screen you can Delete a saved citation, give it a label (tag) and export it to a Bibliographic software tool like refworks
Start page “ My Citations”
You will need a gmail account for this and need to be signed in.
Google Scholar Citations provide a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name, e.g., Richard Feynman. Best of all, it's quick to set up and simple to maintain - even if you have written hundreds of articles, and even if your name is shared by several different scholars. You can add groups of related articles, not just one article at a time; and your citation metrics are computed and updated automatically as Google Scholar finds new citations to your work on the web. You can choose to have your list of articles updated automatically or review the updates yourself, or to manually update your articles at any time.
You can find other researchers in your field by typing in ”label:[keyword]”
Start page ALERTS
2 ways to do this. From this page OR from within a search (side bar says “alert” and will use that search as the alert search text)
Email results of an alert sent to me.
Start page METRICS
Scholar Metrics currently cover articles published between 2009 and 2013,
Start page METRICS
Start page METRICS
Start page SETTINGS
SETTINGS page:
These options also available from within SEARCH
Bibliography manager : useful to set this up so that your citations are imported into your reference manager automatically and you are not prompted every time.
Library links. If you set this up off campus you will in any case be challenged for a password when you access material on a UCT database UNLESS you authenticate first via the Off Campus login.
Start page SEARCH BOX
Start page SEARCH : BOX ADVANCED search
A few hints about searching.
A few hints about searching.
Results page : Types of references.
[CITATION] = Google Scholar does not have access to the full text but does have a citation history. These are articles which other scholarly articles have referred to, but which we haven't found online. To exclude them from your search results, uncheck the "include citations" box on the left sidebar.
[BOOK] = Google Books – but beware – NOT always the entire book, sometimes only parts of it
Reference with SFX@UCT = means it is able to identify the UCT subscriptions and deliver them to you by virtue of your IP range OR the fact that you have signed on via “Off Campus” login
Plain Hyperlink = usually freely available content on the web.
This is the same result but from a session where I haven’t identified myself as a UCT student or staff, resulting in a dead end …
Sometimes GS finds an article but cannot link it back to UCT holdings. In this case it is because it is 1993 article which is only available in print at UCT. So wise to check the library catalogue
Look up “Africana” and “Nettleton”
Sergey Brin – co-founder of Google. What we would expect!!!! Point is that web sites are not everything.
The Google Books library project - Google is in many cases scanning library books without the permission of authors and publishers and thereby infringing copyright. In the states there have been a couple of lawsuits (the Authors Guild for instance). Library partners include Harvard, Columbia, NYPL, Oxford, Princeton and a host of other major academic libraries
Google Books often provides no identification of content beyond the book title. For this reason, Google Books searches are an unreliable indicator of the subject matter
One example of the automatic indexing and the errors produced is that of a batch of books from Harvard University where the bookplates containing a date were scanned along with the text. Another is where advertising matter in a guidebook containing a company’s date of establishment was taken as the date of publication.
BISAC is a system developed by publisher for booksellers so that like books can be grouped on the shop’s shelves.
Google books start page
Limited preview
Snippet view
No preview
Even though it is not viewable, you can check if our Library has a print copy
Search within a book
About this book:
Hyperlinks to other books by that author as well as links to books with the same subject matter (Subject headings not always helpful)
May include user reviews (From Good Reads website) and related books
Book written in 1711. An account of Dutch trade in India. Has subject code “Crafts and Hobbies”!
![Also includes material from :
• Google Books
• The general Google index (e.g. articles from authors
personal websites)
• Bibliographies of publications in Google Scholar
(indicated by [CITATION])
• Patents and USA Courts of law](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/whatgooglescholarcandoforyou-150401045927-conversion-gate01/75/what-google-scholar-can-do-for-you-7-2048.jpg?cb=1673611721)
![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
[HTML] from tandfonline.com SFX@UCT](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/whatgooglescholarcandoforyou-150401045927-conversion-gate01/75/what-google-scholar-can-do-for-you-63-2048.jpg?cb=1673611721)
![“Isn't it true that only librarians like to search?
Everyone else likes to find". [1]
“Finding is easy...” “…but reading is hard.” [2]
Can Google Scholar meet this "read faster" challenge?
1. Tennant, R. 2001. Digital Libraries- Cross-Database Search: One-Stop Shopping. Library journal. 15
October. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA170458.html
2. Sack, J. 2014. Helping Researchers See Farther Faster.
http://googlescholar.blogspot.com/2014/09/10th-anniversary-series-helping.html](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/whatgooglescholarcandoforyou-150401045927-conversion-gate01/75/what-google-scholar-can-do-for-you-82-2048.jpg?cb=1673611721)
