On 14 September 2012 12:47, Tim Green <[email protected]> wrote: > Yeah, in practice google scholar hasn't actually been helpful. How about > just generate a simple Google search? >
I am aware that Google Scholar has been running into some problems the last year or so. The web crawler looks for things on the web that look like peer reviewed scholarly articles (have a title, a list of authors, an abstract, references/biblography &c) for potential inclusion. Apparently certain groups trying to push ideas not generally accepted by academe have been flooding the web with articles in that format which essentially cover the same material each time but just reword some parts, change the title, different authors &c in an attempt to drown out the peer reviewed material. Google have been finding ways to detect this but obviously there are some false positives and it has distracted from other improvements (and whilst crawling the un-peer reviewed stuff the crawler isn't crawling the proper material). This might also go someway to explining why Google Scholar didn't find the blog entry, it didn't look like a peer reviewed article according to the given criteria. Stephen -- It's better to ask a silly question than to make a silly assumption. http://stephensorablog.blogspot.com/ | http://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenboothuk | Skype: stephenbooth_uk PRINCE2 (2009) Practitioner and CHAMPS2 (2010) Practitioner . _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
