Google Scholar
Type of site
| Bibliographic database |
---|---|
Owner | |
Website | scholar |
Registration | Optional |
Launched | November 20, 2004; 14 years ago |
Current status | Active |
History
Features and specifications
Ranking algorithm
Limitations and criticism
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- Quality – Some searchers consider Google Scholar of comparable quality and utility to commercial databases.[24][25] The reviews recognize that its "cited by" feature in particular poses serious competition to Scopus and Web of Science. An early study, from 2007, limited to the biomedical field, found citation information in Google Scholar to be "sometimes inadequate, and less often updated".[26] The coverage of Google Scholar may vary by discipline compared to other general databases.[27]
- Lack of screening for quality – Google Scholar strives to include as many journals as possible, including predatory journals, which "have polluted the global scientific record with pseudo-science, a record that Google Scholar dutifully and perhaps blindly includes in its central index."[28]
- Coverage – Google Scholar does not publish a list of journals crawled or publishers included, and the frequency of its updates is uncertain. Bibliometricevidence suggests Google Scholar's coverage of the sciences and social sciences is competitive with other academic databases; however as of 2017, Scholar's coverage of the arts and humanities has not been investigated empirically and Scholar's utility for disciplines in these fields remains ambiguous.[29] Especially early on, some publishers did not allow Scholar to crawl their journals. Elsevierjournals have been included since mid-2007, when Elsevier began to make most of its ScienceDirect content available to Google Scholar and Google's web search.[30] As of February 2008, the absentees still included the most recent years of the American Chemical Society journals. It is, therefore, impossible to know how current or exhaustive searches are in Google Scholar, although a recent study[4] estimates that Google Scholar can find almost 90% (approximately 100 million) of all scholarly documents on the Web written in English. Large-scale longitudinal studies have found between 40–60% of scientific articles are available in full text via Google Scholar links.[31]
- Matthew effect – Google Scholar puts high weight on citation counts in its ranking algorithm and therefore is being criticized for strengthening the Matthew effect;[22] as highly cited papers appear in top positions they gain more citations while new papers hardly appear in top positions and therefore get less attention by the users of Google Scholar and hence fewer citations.
- Google Scholar effect – It is a phenomenon when some researchers pick and cite works appearing in the top results on Google Scholar regardless of their contribution to the citing publication because they automatically assume these works’ credibility and believe that editors, reviewers, and readers expect to see these citations.[32]
- Incorrect field detection – Google Scholar has problems identifying publications on the arXiv preprint server correctly. Interpunctuation characters in titles produce wrong search results, and authors are assigned to wrong papers, which leads to erroneous additional search results. Some search results are even given without any comprehensible reason.[33][34]
- Vulnerability to spam – Google Scholar is vulnerable to spam.[35][36]Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg demonstrated that citation counts on Google Scholar can be manipulated and complete non-sense articles created with SCIgen were indexed from Google Scholar.[37] They concluded that citation counts from Google Scholar should only be used with care especially when used to calculate performance metrics such as the h-index or impact factor. Google Scholar started computing an h-index in 2012 with the advent of individual Scholar pages. Several downstream packages like Harzing's Publish or Perish also use its data.[38] The practicality of manipulating h-index calculators by spoofingGoogle Scholar was demonstrated in 2010 by Cyril Labbe from Joseph Fourier University, who managed to rank "Ike Antkare" ahead of Albert Einstein by means of a large set of SCIgen-produced documents citing each other (effectively an academic link farm).[39]
- Inability to shepardize case law – As of 2010, Google Scholar was not able to shepardize case law, as Lexis can.[40]
Search engine optimization for Google Scholar
See also
- List of academic databases and search engines
- Microsoft Academic Search
- Paperpile
- ResearchGate
- Science Citation Index
References
- "Search Tips: Content Coverage". Google Scholar. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
- Gusenbauer, Michael (2018-11-10). "Google Scholar to overshadow them all? Comparing the sizes of 12 academic search engines and bibliographic databases". Scientometrics. 118: 177–214. doi:10.1007/s11192-018-2958-5. ISSN 0138-9130.
- Orduña-Malea, E., Ayllón, J. M., Martín-Martín, A., & Delgado López-Cózar, E. (2015). Methods for estimating the size of Google Scholar. Scientometrics, 104(3), 931–49. ArXiv
- ^ a b Trend Watch (2014) Nature 509(7501), 405 – discussing Madian Khabsa and C Lee Giles (2014) The Number of Scholarly Documents on the Public Web, PLOS ONE 9, e93949.
- Kolata, Gina (30 October 2017). "Many Academics Are Eager to Publish in Worthless Journals". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 November 2017.
- Giles, J. (2005). "Science in the web age: Start your engines". Nature. 438(7068): 554–55. Bibcode:2005Natur.438..554G. doi:10.1038/438554a. PMID 16319857.
- Hughes, Tracey (December 2006). "An interview with Anurag Acharya, Google Scholar lead engineer". Google Librarian Central.
- Assisi, Francis C. (3 January 2005). "Anurag Acharya Helped Google's Scholarly Leap". INDOlink. Archived from the original on 2011-06-08. Retrieved 2007-04-19.
- Steven Levy (2015) The gentleman who made Scholar. "Back channel" on Medium.
- Quint, Barbara (August 27, 2007). "Changes at Google Scholar: A Conversation With Anurag Acharya". Information Today.
- Madrigal, Alexis C. (3 April 2012). "20 Services Google Thinks Are More Important Than Google Scholar". Atlantic.
- ^ a b Alex Verstak: "Fresh Look of Scholar Profiles". Google Scholar Blog, August 21, 2014
- James Connor: "Google Scholar Library". Google Scholar Blog, November 19, 2013
- "International Journal of Internet Science – Google Scholar Citations". Retrieved 2014-08-22.
- Google Scholar Library Links
- ^ a b Vine, Rita (January 2006). "Google Scholar". Journal of the Medical Library Association. 94 (1): 97–99. PMC 1324783.
- ^ a b "About Google Scholar". Retrieved 2010-07-29.
- ^ a b "Google Scholar Help".
- Official Google Blog: Exploring the scholarly neighborhood
- Dreiling, Geri (May 11, 2011). "How to Use Google Scholar for Legal Research". Lawyer Tech Review.
- "Google Scholar Legal Content Star Paginator". Retrieved 2011-06-06.
- ^ a b Jöran Beel and Bela Gipp. Google Scholar's Ranking Algorithm: An Introductory Overview. In Birger Larsen and Jacqueline Leta, editors, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI'09), vol. 1, pp. 230–41, Rio de Janeiro, July 2009. International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics. ISSN 2175-1935.
- Beel, J.; Gipp, B. (2009). Google Scholar's ranking algorithm: The impact of citation counts (An empirical study). 2009 Third International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science. pp. 439–46. doi:10.1109/RCIS.2009.5089308. ISBN 978-1-4244-2864-9.
- Bauer, Kathleen; Bakkalbasi, Nisa (September 2005). "An Examination of Citation Counts in a New Scholarly Communication Environment". D-Lib Magazine. 11 (9). doi:10.1045/september2005-bauer.
- Kulkarni, A. V.; Aziz, B.; Shams, I.; Busse, J. W. (2009). "Comparisons of Citations in Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar for Articles Published in General Medical Journals". JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association. 302 (10): 1092–96. doi:10.1001/jama.2009.1307. PMID 19738094.
- Falagas, M. E.; Pitsouni, E. I.; Malietzis, G. A.; Pappas, G. (2007). "Comparison of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar: Strengths and weaknesses". The FASEB Journal. 22 (2): 338–42. doi:10.1096/fj.07-9492LSF. PMID 17884971.
- Kousha, K.; Thelwall, M. (2007). "Google Scholar citations and Google Web/URL citations: A multi-discipline exploratory analysis". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 57 (6): 1055–65. doi:10.1002/asi.20584.
- Beall, Jeffrey (November 2014). "Google Scholar is Filled with Junk Science". Scholarly Open Access. Archived from the original on 2014-11-07. Retrieved 2014-11-10.
- Fagan, Jody (2017). "An evidence-based review of academic web search engines, 2014–2016: Implications for librarians' practice and research agenda". Information Technology and Libraries. 36: 7–47.
- Brantley, Peter (3 July 2007). "Science Direct-ly into Google". O'Reilly Radar. Archived from the original on 21 April 2008.
- Martín-Martín, Alberto; Orduña-Malea, Enrique; Ayllón, Juan Manuel; Delgado López-Cózar, Emilio (2014-10-30). "Does Google Scholar contain all highly cited documents (1950–2013)?". arXiv:1410.8464 [cs.DL].
- Serenko, A.; Dumay, J. (2015). "Citation classics published in knowledge management journals. Part II: Studying research trends and discovering the Google Scholar Effect" (PDF). Journal of Knowledge Management. 19 (6): 1335–55. doi:10.1108/JKM-02-2015-0086.
- Jacso, Peter (24 September 2009). "Google Scholar's Ghost Authors, Lost Authors, and Other Problems". Library Journal. Archived from the original on 7 June 2011.
- Péter Jacsó (2010). "Metadata mega mess in Google Scholar". Online Information Review. 34: 175–91. doi:10.1108/14684521011024191.
- On the Robustness of Google Scholar against Spam
- Scholarly Open Access – Did A Romanian Researcher Successfully Game Google Scholar to Raise his Citation Count? Archived 2015-01-22 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ a b Beel, Joeran; Gipp, Bela (December 2010). "Academic search engine spam and google scholar's resilience against it". Journal of Electronic Publishing. 13 (3). doi:10.3998/3336451.0013.305.
- "Publish or Perish". Anne-Wil Harzing.com. Retrieved 2013-06-15.
- Labbe, Cyril (2010). "Ike Antkare one of the great stars in the scientific firmament" (PDF). Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble RR-LIG-2008 (technical report). Joseph Fourier University.
- Oliver Benn (March 9, 2010). "Is Google Scholar a Worthy Adversary?". Law Technology News.
- ^ a b Beel, Jöran; Gipp, Bela; Wilde, Erik (2010). "Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO)". Journal of Scholarly Publishing. 41 (2): 176–90. doi:10.3138/jsp.41.2.176.
- "Get found – optimize your research articles for search engines".
- "Why and how should you optimize academic articles for search engines?".
- "Academic SEO – Market (And Publish) or Perish". 2010-11-29.
- "Help Readers Find Your Article". 2015-05-19.