GoogleandGoogleScholar-BodleianLibrariesHome.ppt

Pros and Cons Katharine Jackson January 2010 (adapted from the 2009 session) Today Google Scholar offers a very convenient method of retrieving article citations and often the accompanying full text, and is growing in popularity. This session offers tips on using it effectively and extending your search to other sources should Scholars coverage prove inadequate for your purposes. The World Wide Web – how useful is it? Coverage of Google Scholar (GS) Using Google Scholar to find academic material How to get the most out of Google Scholar Pros and Cons in comparison to other sources Welcome to the Web Welcome to the Web The world’s biggest haystack Looking for a needle - why start in a haystack? Why do people love Google? Very fast – it even tells you how fast Brings up a large number of results Often has a number of ‘relevant’ results within the first page Simple interface It’s free Finding needles – how does Google do it? Google is an index of web pages It uses clever algorithms that take into account links from other pages and click throughs BUT Google are very secretive as to exactly how they do it So why not use it for journal articles?... Individual articles may not be a web page Articles may be behind a firewall and how are you going to know? The sheer amount of results Are the top results the ‘best result’? How would you index an article? Read it? Google doesn’t read Give it controlled index terms? Google doesn’t have a controlled vocabulary Be able to see the context? Google is not able to determine context So what did Google do…. Teamed up with publishers so they let them search behind their firewalls Modified the algorithm so it excludes non-scholarly material (as defined by Google of course) Used citations to help relevance Included library locations for full-text access (Library Link) But what did they not do… Create controlled vocabularies Create standardisation of journal names/abbreviations Give any details of which jo