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Abstract
Purpose - To identify the pros and the cons of Google Scholar.
Design/methodology/approach - Chronicles the recent history of the Google Scholar search engine from its inception in November 2004 and critiques it with regard to its merits and demerits.
Findings - Feels that there are massive content omissions presently but that, with future changes in its structure, Google Scholar will become an excellent free tool for scholarly information discovery and retrieval.
Originality/value - Presents a useful analysis for potential users of the Google Scholar site.
Keywords Reference services, Internet, Search engines
Paper type General review
The launch of Google Scholar - not surprisingly - drew much attention and praise, although not necessarily for the right reasons, both from the popular and the professional media. Google makes it very easy and free to find scholarly information about any topic - an important service for those who do not have access to the most appropriate fee-based indexing/abstracting databases which traditionally have helped in information discovery. Google Scholar goes beyond information discovery by leading qualifying users at subscribing libraries to the primary digital documents, and any users to the millions of open access (free) primary documents offered through mega-databases of preprint and reprint servers, as well as to the full text digital collections of several government agencies and research organizations. Google also deserves credit for introducing - albeit a bit belatedly - advanced options to refine the search process. On the negative side, the most important problem is that the crawlers of Google Scholar have not indexed millions of articles, even though they were let into the digital archives of most of the largest academic publishers and preprint servers and repositories. The stunning gaps give a false impression of the scholarly coverage of topics and lead to the omission of highly relevant articles by those who need more than just a few pertinent research documents. The rather enigmatic presentation of the results befuddles many users and the lack of any sort options frustrates the savvy searchers.
Pros
Google deserves credit for making the first step in providing a tool for discovering scholarly information, even though access may be limited to very short bibliographic citations of articles and conference papers in a sizable segment of Google...