With all the emphasis on immediate open access, I'm wondering - how up to date is google scholar?
A quick search by publication year yields the following: 2001: 62,000 items 2002: 68,600 items 2003: 63,700 items 2004: 8,060 items While it is possible that 2004 statistics will not be complete due to publishing delays, this does suggest to me that there is a delay in google scholar harvesting - whether of open access or subscription-based resources, or both, is hard to say of course. I do think this data suggests that if there is one place to look for OA materials at the moment, it is not google scholar. My own searching confirms this suspicion - I am finding that if a needed item is not found in google scholar, then an open access copy may well still be found through a regular web search. hope this helps, Heather Morrison On 16-Feb-05, at 6:16 AM, Thomas Walker wrote:
As T.S.Mahadevan recently pointed out on the BOAI Forum, what those who are searching for open archive and other scholarly literature really want is a single website where they can search the entire set of such literature. Google is already accounting for a significant portion of the hits on the OA journal articles I monitor. Might Google Scholar be that website? ======= Google Scholar (beta version online at http://scholar.google.com) restricts Google searches to scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all fields of research, and finds articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Google Scholar ranks search results by their relevance to the query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. The relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means that search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications. [Parts of this description taken directly from http://scholar.google.com/scholar/about.html#about.] ======= Tom Walker ============================================ Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://tjwalker.ifas.ufl.edu ============================================
Heather G. Morrison Project Coordinator BC Electronic Library Network ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Phone: 604-268-7001 Fax: 604-291-3023 Email: heath...@eln.bc.ca Web: http://www.eln.bc.ca
