Good bye Britney Spears, hello academic journals

One of the best stories about Scholar from a college paper I've seen yet.

Google Scholar is a different and more accurate way to find academically appropriate and peer-reviewed journal articles without getting all the rock star bios, sports results and blogs.

Scholar on the Home Page

Brad writes in to note that Scholar now appears as a link on the Google homepage. He's not seeing it on his screen at home, so there's a possibility that Google is singling out users coming from known .edu's. (Or maybe not.)

Physicians and google Scholar

Rita points everyone towards an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal titled "Google Scholar: A source for clinicians?" The general conclusion is:

Google's launch of Scholar indicates the growing sophistication of Internet searchers. It addresses concerns about the quality of information found on the Internet and integrates previously inaccessible, high-quality commercial sites with more reliable sites available on the public Internet. Google Scholar may develop into a free, sophisticated tool, but, at least in the beta version, it is not a useful choice for clinicians.

Interesting

MSU library partners with Google

Google recently approached Innovative Interfaces Inc., the longtime vendor of MSU's MAGIC catalog, in regard to setting up a pilot project to combine Innovative Interfaces software with the Google Scholar search engine, said Nancy Fleck, assistant director of technical services at the MSU library. Google Scholar is an academic search engine for scholarly literature.

I'm not sure if this is something truly innovative (natch) or just a retelling of things we already know, and that something has been lost in the translation.

Jasco on Google Scholar (Redux)

I thought I'd posted this latest review of Scholar, but several of you have written in to share it with me (thanks) and as it turns out, I was thinking of something else. Peter again, puts Scholar through its' paces as no one else can, and finds several interesting deficiencies. His verdict essentially is that Scholar is not yet near the point where libraries should be dropping databases because of it.

I tend to agree, though I'm not as dismissive. I've talked to enough faculty who've said that they no longer use our databases in favor of Scholar (a practice that will likely trickle down to students) to know that they aren't really all that concerned with the bulk of the complaints raised by the detractors of Scholar. Scholar works. And it works in a way that presents very little in the way of the hoops that we make them jump through to use our library databases. As a result, I believe that (most) researchers will be very happy with tools that are "just good enough." As a librarian, I bristle at the thought. As a realist, I completely understand where they're coming from...