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| File |
Description |
Size | Format | Visibility |
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| OIR-Mayr-Walter-2007.pdf | | 562.8 kB | Adobe PDF | View/Open
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| Author(s): | Mayr, Philipp
Walter, Anne-Kathrin |
| Title: | An exploratory study of Google Scholar |
| Subjects: | H. Information sources, supports, channels > HN. e-journals
L. Information technology and library technology > LS. Search engines
H. Information sources, supports, channels > HS. Repositories (OAI-compliant and not) |
| Date: | 2007 |
| Abstract: | Purpose – This paper discusses the new scientific search service Google Scholar (GS). This
search engine, intended for searching exclusively scholarly documents, will be described with
its most important functionality and then empirically tested. The focus is on an exploratory
study which investigates the coverage of scientific serials in GS.
Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on queries against different journal lists:
international scientific journals from Thomson Scientific (SCI, SSCI, AH), Open Access
journals from the DOAJ list and journals of the German social sciences literature database
SOLIS as well as the analysis of result data from GS. All data gathering took place in August
2006.
Findings – The study shows deficiencies in the coverage and up-to-dateness of the GS index.
Furthermore, the study points up which web servers are the most important data providers for
this search service and which information sources are highly represented. We can show that
there is a relatively large gap in Google Scholar’s coverage of German literature as well as
weaknesses in the accessibility of Open Access content. Major commercial academic
publishers are currently the main data providers.
Research limitations/implications – Five different journal lists were analyzed, including
approximately 9,500 single titles. The lists are from different fields and of various sizes. This
limits comparability. There were also some problems matching the journal titles of the
original lists to the journal title data provided by Google Scholar. We were only able to
analyze the top 100 Google Scholar hits per journal.
Practical implications – We conclude that Google Scholar has some interesting pros (such as
citation analysis and free materials) but the service can not be seen as a substitute for the use
of special abstracting and indexing databases and library catalogues due to various
weaknesses (such as transparency, coverage and up-to-dateness).
Originality/value – We do not know of any other study using such a brute force approach and
such a large empirical basis. Our study can be considered as using brute force in the sense that
we gathered lots of data from Google, then analyzed the data in a macroscopic way. |
| Alternative Locations: | http://www.ib.hu-berlin.de/~mayr/arbeiten/OIR-Mayr-Walter-2007.pdf |
| Keywords: | Search engines, Digital libraries, Worldwide Web, Serials, Electronic journals |
| Country: | Germany |
| Type: | Preprint |
| Rights: | http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/ |
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