Google Scholar: The New Generation of Citation Indexes - Libri

Google ScholarThe principal rationale and advantage forGoogle Scholar is that it will democratize accessto the intellectual resources of elite institutions(Banks 2005). Google Scholar enables researchersto navigate the scholarly literature on the Web inunique ways. Researchers are able to locate relatedarticles, independent of title words, language,nomenclature or author-supplied keywords. Thisautomated citation index is a multidisciplinaryindex covering virtually all sciences and disciplinesand not limited to a single language, country,field or discipline; it also covers all types ofpublished source items. However, Google Scholaris not fully comprehensive.The purpose of this study is to answer the followingquestions:• What is the purpose of Google Scholar as a free citationindex?• What are the advantages and disadvantages of GoogleScholar?Introduction to Google ScholarGoogle Scholar is the scholarly search tool of theworld’s largest and most powerful search engine,Google. Google Scholar was developed byAnurag Acharya, an Indian-born computer scientist.It is an incredible tool allowing researchers tolocate a wide array of scholarly literature on theWeb, including scholarly journals, abstracts, peerreviewedarticles, theses, dissertations, books,preprints, PowerPoint presentations and technicalreports from universities, academic institutions,professional societies, research groups, andpreprint repositories around the world. As such,it has become a gateway to accessing scholarly informationon the Web. Every day more scholarlyinformation is available online and we continueto discover new reasons to need access to this information.If Google Scholar makes more openaccessscholarly material accessible, the price ofacademic journals and databases may decrease orstabilize as they strive to compete. Thus thegreater the accessibility of scholarly material, thegreater is the value for researchers.What makes Google Scholar most useful is itscitation index feature. Google Scholar consists ofarticles, with a sub-list under each article of thesubsequently published resources that cite the article;Google Scholar shows who cited a given articleat a later point in time. In Google Scholar,“papers with many citations are generally rankedhighest, and they get a further boost if they arereferenced by highly cited articles” (Butler2004). Google Scholar ranks search results byhow relevant they are to a query, considering thetitle and the full text of each article as well as thepublication in which the article appeared andhow often it has been cited in other scholarly literature(Google Scholar 2005). So the most relateddocuments should appear at the top of the retrievedresults. Furthermore, Google Scholarautomatically extracts and analyzes citations andpresents them as separate results, even if thedocuments they refer to are not available on theWeb. So it analyzes the popularity of a documentaccording to the number of times it has been citedby other documents, and generally displays theretrieved results showing the most-cited referencesfirst.In the future, Google Scholar may be used forcitation analysis, through bibliometric techniques,which measure the impact factor of anindividual publication as a function of the numberof citations it receives from subsequent authors.In addition, any author may legitimatelywish to determine whether his/her own workhas been criticized or used by others on the Web.Authors are interested in knowing whether anyonehas cited their works and/or whether otherresearchers in their fields have commented onthem. Google Scholar facilitates this type of feedbackin the scholarly communication cycle on theWeb. Regardless of the year that the article waspublished, Google Scholar permits researchers toidentify where that article was cited. Researcherscan locate recent articles that have cited the particulararticle. A further use of Google Scholar isto identify scientists currently working in specificbranches of science in order to suggest collaboration,to enter into correspondence, etc. Moreover,Google Scholar provides remote access to the indexedresources.Comparing Google Scholar and Web ofScienceA commonly used technique of conducting a literaturesearch is to begin the search with a relevantarticle and look up the references cited inthis article as well as the articles citing it. For ex-171