Open Access News

Although Google Scholar covers a great range of topical areas, it appears to be strongest in the sciences, particularly medicine, and secondarily in the social sciences. The company claims to have full-text content from all major publishers except Elsevier and the American Chemical Society, as well as hosting services such as Highwire and Ingenta. Much of Google Scholar's index derives from a crawl of full-text journal content provided by both commercial and open source publishers. Specialized bibliographic databases like OCLC's Open WorldCat and the National Library of Medicine's PubMed are also crawled. Since 2003, Google has entered into numerous individual agreements with publishers to index full-text content not otherwise accessible via the open Web. Although Google does not divulge the number or names of publishers that have entered into crawling or indexing agreements with the company, it is easy to see why publishers would be eager to boost their content's visibility through a powerhouse like Google....The inadequacies of Google Scholar have already been well documented in reviews. These reviews focused on three major weaknesses of the tool: lack of sufficient advanced search features, lack of transparency of the database content, and uneven coverage of the database. Henderson's review of Google Scholar demonstrated its significant limitations for clinician use. Tests conducted by Jacso showed that Google Scholar typically crawled only a subset of the full available content of individual journals or databases. In February 2005, Vine discovered that Google Scholar was almost a full year behind indexing PubMed records and concluded that “no serious researcher interested in current medical information or practice excellence should rely on Google Scholar for up to date information”. With a simple, basic search interface and only minimal advanced search features, Google Scholar lacks almost every important feature of MEDLINE. It does not map to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH); does not permit nested Boolean searching; lacks essential features like explosions, subheadings, or publication-type limits; and offers searchers no ability to benefit from the extraordinary indexing that the National Library of Medicine provides. Google Scholar's closest free Web competitor, the quasi-scientific search tool Scirus from Elsevier, crawls a defined subset of free Web pages plus full-text content from Elsevier journals, patents, preprints, and more. Unlike Google Scholar, the Scirus project team is quick, even eager, to disclose the content of the Scirus database and regularly feeds new partner content into the database in its “About Us” section....Google Scholar has some great features. It is cited by × feature, which links a result to other items in the Google Scholar database that reference the item, a quick and fast way to find citations. Although it is not comprehensive, no other citation-linking tool in the marketplace is....Cyber sleuths can also use Google Scholar to find a free Web version of an article that might have started out behind a publisher's authentication firewall but has been downloaded by someone and then put on a public Web server.

Update. Dean Giustini has written some comments on Vine's review.