Greg Notess Scholarly Web Searching: Google Scholar and Scirus, Online, July/August 2005. Excerpt: 'A quick comparison with a search for the terms protonation alkylation finds a claim of 2,068 journal article hits and another 1,524 Web results at Scirus. The same search at Google Scholar reports "about 1,820" records of all types. Given Google’s usual difficulty in accurately counting results, that number is probably within about 500 records or so of the actual amount. On other searches Scholar finds more, but since each covers unique content, neither is comprehensive. The same search in the native interface American Chemical Society (ACS) publications database finds 21,685 articles. The ACS journals are included in neither Scholar nor Scirus....Both Scholar and Scirus search through the full text of an article, but this is inconsistent. Searching phrases found toward the end of an article may fail to retrieve the article. For those online journal packages that include full-text searching capabilities, using the native search interface will be more comprehensive....For fielded searching using authors, date, subject terms, or article type, the commercial databases and native search interfaces have many more choices....The freshness of these databases is a significant issue. As Joann Wleklinski noted in her May/June 2005 ONLINE article...the database used by Google Scholar is static at this point --it's not adding newer documents. Scholar definitely needs to be updated more frequently. In fact, at this point, the main Google Web search is a much better tool for finding recent scholarly documents than Google Scholar....Strangely enough, both of these tools may work better, or at least appear to work better, for the affiliated scholar. With all the subscriptions available on campus based on IP access authentication, the campus-based researcher finds that the links in Google Scholar and Scirus work seamlessly, providing direct access to the full-text articles. Both would work better if the Open-URL resolver could be added automatically, based on IP address, since many institutions have multiple access points, or like us, have our Elsevier subscriptions on a non-ScienceDirect platform.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/01/2005 05:06:00 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.
