Google Scholar


A new tool from Google. They've indexed the "scientific literature."

OK, so I went to google scholar as soon as I found out about it (on an AP story). It was impressive, but it is really not ready for prime-time. I'm sorry, but I have papers with more than 30 citations, and they were barely showing up. If it can't search all the literature, it's still just a research toy, like "regalur" google (which I use all the time--except for literature searches).



Here's an example (I'm not being vain, just I know my own work better than anyone else's, naturally):

Dif f ractive optics implementation of six-wave mixing
V Astinov, KJ Kubarych, CJ Milne, RJD Miller - Cited by 10
... Dif f ractive optics implementation of six-wave mixing. ... (050.1970) Diffraction and
gratings : Diffractive optics (300.6450) Spectroscopy : Spectroscopy, Raman. ...
Optics Letters, 2000 - ol.osa.org - adsabs.harvard.edu

OK, so we'll forgive the strange formatting, but "Cited by 10" is totally insane, this paper has 33 citations according to Web of Science. Another paper we did, which has 26 citations according to Web of Science, only garners 5 according to Google:

Diffractive optics-based six-wave mixing: Heterodyne detection of the full χ tensor of liquid CS
KJ Kubarych, CJ Milne, S Lin, V Astinov, RJD … - Cited by 5
... KJ Kubarych, CJ Milne, S. Lin, V. Astinov, RJD Miller. Abstract. This work exploits
the passive phase stabilization of diffractive optics to implement heterodyne ...
The Journal of Chemical Physics, 2002 - link.aip.org - adsabs.harvard.edu

So is Google Scholar a worthwhile tool? I don't know. But I will continue to use it and we will post to the plexus from time to time with thoughts on the usage of this new research tool. I use normal pleb google all the time, even for non-pleb science stuff, so we can only hope that "scholar" will become something usefull. In any case, if your school can't front the cash for the journals, you're not going to benefit from this new search tool—other than to feel crappy knowing that so many other institutions have much more access than you do. Personally, I suspect that google scholar will further perpetuate the Nature/Science/PNAS/PRL mythology for us physical scientists—what it does for you "other" folk, I don't know.

Posted: Fri - November 26, 2004 at 12:08 AM         |

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