Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across a variety of publication formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes the most peer-reviewed online journals from the most scholarly publishers in Europe and the Americas. In operation it is very similar to the freely-available CIRES from Elsevier, Cite SeerX and get CITED.Also it is a subscription-based tool similar to Elsevier’s Scopus and Thomson ISI’s Web of Science. Its advertising slogan – “Stand on the Shoulder of Giants” – is a nod to the scholars who have contributed to their fields over the centuries and provided the foundation for innovative intellectual achievements.
history of google scholar
Google Scholar resulted from a discussion between Alex Verstek and Anurag Acharya, both of whom were building Google’s web index at the time.In 2006, in response to the release of Microsoft’s Windows Live Academic Search, a potential competitor to Google Scholar, a citation import feature was implemented using bibliography managers (RefWorks, Refman, Endnote, and BibTax). Similar features are also part of other search engines such as SiteSeer and Cyrus.
In 2007, Acharya announced that Google Scholar would launch a program for digitizing and organizing journal articles in agreement with its publishers, an attempt to break away from Google Books, which included scans of older journals at specific points in time. did not contain the metadata needed to identify specific articles.
Limitations and Criticisms of google scholar
Some searchers consider Google Scholar to be of comparable quality and usefulness to commercial databases, even though its user interface (UI) is still in beta. Scopus and ISI establish the Sited By feature in particularly serious competition for reviews, although they generally show less results than subscription services.
A significant problem with Google Scholar is the secrecy surrounding its coverage. Some publishers do not allow their journals to be crawled. Elsevier Journals was not included until mid-2007, when Google Scholar and Google’s web search began building most of its ScienceDirect content. As of February 2008, the missing journals still include the most recent years of American Chemical Society journals. Google Scholar does not crawl lists of published scientific journals, and the frequency of its updates is unknown. So it becomes impossible to know how Google search results in current or complete search. However, it gives easy access to published articles without the difficulties in some of the most expensive commercial databases.
Google Scholar places great emphasis on citation count in its ranking algorithm and has therefore been criticized for reinforcing the Matthew effect : as multi-cited forms appear in the top they tend to garner more citations, while New papers rarely appear in the top and therefore receive less attention and less appreciation from Google users.
Google Scholar has a problem correctly identifying publications on the arXiv preprint server. Internal punctuation in titles lead to incorrect search results and authors are assigned to the wrong paper, which is additional incorrect search results. Even some search results for no apparent reason.
Google Scholar is prone to spam. [15]. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg have demonstrated that citations can be manipulated on Google Scholar, among others. Therefore, they conclude that the citation citation count from Google Scholar should be used with caution, especially when used to calculate performance metrics such as the H-index or impact factor.
