Jim Henderson, Google Scholar: A source for clinicians?Canadian Medical Association Journal, June 7, 2005. Excerpt: 'The ideal tool for finding clinical information would be a fast engine that provides the best hits from scholarly journal literature and clinical resources such as guidelines, perhaps emphasizing sites favoured by physicians in the way that Google emphasizes popular websites for general audiences. Busy clinicians would wish for succinct reviews and for the best evidence, with links to key papers that would be determined as such by the number of times they have been cited, thus balancing popularity with relevance and quality. Features enabling search refinement would be welcome, such as a tool to find related articles by subject or by using links or citations, including more recent articles that cite the retrieved items. Ideally, this engine would provide integrated, powerful access to many sources, including full-text journal literature and textbooks, evidence-based information, information for patients, and drug information, achieving for clinical sources what Google has for the entire public Internet. The current version of Google Scholar focuses on Internet sites that contain information that is critically appraised, such as the peer-reviewed journal literature, or that are produced by reputable sources, such as universities. Through agreements with publishers, Scholar accesses the "invisible" or "deep" Web, that is, commercial Web sites the automated "spiders" used by search engines such as Google cannot access. Using text analysis and the number of links from other sites, Scholar rapidly delivers a ranked listing, as Google does. Each item includes the number of links to it — in effect, a citation tracker, providing for free what interfaces such as Web of Science and Elsevier's Scopus provide at much cost. Scholar is collaborating with university libraries to develop a way to access full-text journals through institutional subscriptions, so that researchers and physicians affiliated with a university can go directly from a Scholar search to a full-text journal article if their university has a subscription to that journal. Also intriguing is the potential of future versions of Scholar to give free, efficient access to articles from commercial journals reproduced for open access on personal or institutional pages....There are shortcomings....' (Thanks to T.J. Sondermann.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/10/2005 03:15:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
