Google Scholar

Electronic databases provided by the University Library are now complemented by the latest in a growing number of specialist Google services [along with Google News, Google Images], Google Scholar, which is a free service for searching specifically scholarly literature including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.

While still only in beta release, Google has already established a couple of vital relationships with key players in the scholarly communications business. Firstly, Google is parternering with CrossRef, the cooperatively maintained central database of links to the fulltext of over 12 million articles from over 650 academic publishers. CrossRef has not so far been directly accessible to the public but, in 2004, 29 publishers have been collaborating with Google in making the fulltext of their content available to the Google search engine. While search results can, at this stage, appear somewhat inconsistent, any extension of Google indexing to the complete CrossRef database will clearly be of great interest to the University community. While at the moment there remain substantial gaps in the indexing of publisher sites these are, to some extent, compensated for by the indexing of abstracts databases in particular subject areas, such as PubMed for medicine.

Another interesting area of collaboration is being explored between Google and libraries worldwide. In the beta version of Google Scholar, this is being done on an experimental basis with the inclusion of >2 million records from the 57 million strong WorldCat database -- the combined catalogue of [mainly] North American libraries.

What implications does this have for University of Adelaide staff and students? Well, it means that users have an easily available link to searching some important chunks of the scholarly literature ? although at this stage any understanding of exactly which chunks Google Scholar covers has to be acquired without reference to Google itself, as they are providing very little information about the current or projected scope of the service.

Another issue with Scholar is that much of the fulltext content covered is not freely available and, at this stage, users will not be able to determine which links will yield them access to text to which the Library subscribes or books which the Library owns. For example, the closest that the ?Library Search? feature [which crops up when your search retrieves book titles] will take you to is the University of Queensland, as it's the only Australian participant in the WorldCat database, even though many other Australian libraries may have the title.

University users will find that the wide range of specialist electronic databases to which the Library provides access - see our new web page Find articles on a subject - yields many additional resources. In terms of finding identifiable links to available fulltext, most of the electronic databases provided by the Library do now incorporate such a facility. In 2005, the Library will provide a service - a Library portal - which will enable cross-searching of a range of databases, and will include still more links out to available full text.

No doubt Google Scholar will be working to improve its coverage and linking, while the Library also will be working to make its licensed resources more readily accessible. We will be monitoring the development of Google Scholar, and reporting on how it can best serve our users.

If you'd like more information, advice or training on how you can best use Google Scholar to complement other resources in your discipline, contact your Research or Branch librarian.

If you're interested in more comments on Google Scholar, check the On Google Scholar weblog.