Monday, August 01, 2005

What's in Google Scholar?

Well, this is info I've wondered about. I knew that GoogleScholar didn't cover all online journals but hadn't heard how they picked what they included. Maybe it was already out there but I hadn't heard this. Information Today says they initially focused (my emmphasis)

... on research articles from publishers participating in the CrossRef project and several collections of online preprints and other major scholarly sites, ... (although its original coverage was stronger in science and technology than in the social sciences)....

It also includes

...links to individual documents, ... [and] citation references extracted from other documents using special algorithms developed at Google.

3 comments:

Tina Shrader said...

Oooh... 'special algorithms'. That makes it sound all mysterious.

I'm always a little suspiscious of search results when I don't know how I got them...

Susan Payne said...

Stephen Abram's (VP of Innovation from SIRSI) has the theory that the reason Gmail mines your e-mail and your desktop (if you download that tool) is to eventually offer search results that are tailored to you. So if Google determines you are a historian, when you search google you will get search results geared more for what it thinks you are looking for. So a historian's search on Lincoln could pull Abe up, while a generic search might bring something up about the car.

He seemed to know a lot about what google is currently doing. This is an interesting idea to me.

He also suggested that in the future, if people do a google search in your library we will be able to point them first to our library resources.

This must be through IP? This doesn't sound that far-fetched to me.

Woodson said...

VP of Innovation--that's the job I want!