Google Scholar

November 18, 2004 at 1 pm · Filed under Site Reviews

This morning I tried out the Google offering-du-jour: Google Scholar. For the past couple years I’ve used CiteSeer when doing research. It goes one crucial step further than Google Scholar in that it offers a page that lists the abstract, who the article cites, and who the article is cited by. Citations are the primary means for tracking lines of research and getting to know the players in a field, so it’s appropriate that citations are given so much emphasis.

To compare, Google Scholar only lists who a paper is cited by, not who it cites. It also doesn’t group citations together in an easily scannable format. It does have a helpful “Library Search” link though, and appears more scalable &mdash I got a “server busy” error three times while searching CiteSeer.

Anyhow, compare searches for “interaction design” on Scholar and CiteSeer. I found an old classic on Scholar I wanted to comment on, but I’ll save that for another post.

5 Comments

  1. Anne said,

    November 18, 2004 @ 1 pm

    Citations are the primary means for tracking lines of research and getting to know the players in a field, so it’s appropriate that citations are given so much emphasis.

    Yes and no. I mean, I always read the bibliography first, but sites like IngentaConnect still offer more comprehensive arts and science article searching…

  2. chad said,

    November 18, 2004 @ 2 pm

    Agreed, though IngentaConnect seems like a different type of search than CiteSeer and Scholar, since most of their content isn’t publicly accessible. I wonder how the index size of CiteSeer and Scholar compare to IngentaConnect…

  3. Anne said,

    November 18, 2004 @ 4 pm

    True. And I wondered that as well… How can we find out?

  4. chad said,

    November 18, 2004 @ 5 pm

    Well, CiteSeer says they have 716,797 documents. IngentaConnect is 17,311,812 - about 24x as many. This article says Google isn’t saying how many. I could probably find out, but it sounds like it’s deliberately not public knowledge, at least for now.

    Given CiteSeer’s fairly narrow focus, it’s a safe assumption it’s bigger than CiteSeer but smaller than Ingenta, what with all those restricted access journals…

  5. Tanya said,

    December 8, 2004 @ 3 pm

    Since you can search CiteSeer using google, doesn’t that mean that CiteSeer is included in Google Scholar?

    Here’s a very thorough review of it.

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