Searching Scholarly Literature:

A Google Scholar Perspective

Anurag Acharya

Overview

Goals & key ideas

Support for libraries

Coverage & usage

Reflections

Goal: Best possible scholarly search

Single place to find scholarly material

– All areas, all sources, all languages, all time

– Relevance-based ordering (“Google-like”)

Easy to use

– Common queries should just work

– Researchers, like everyone else, just want answers

Idea: Index all forms of articles

Preferred form: fulltext

– Go beyond author identified features

– Facilitate serendipity

Fulltext online for only small fraction

– Influential/seminal papers still offline

Index whatever form is available

– Abstract or even just the citation

Idea: Be inclusive Provide worldwide visibility to all research

– Should be able to find research done anywhere

– Who knows what triggers discovery

Our goal is to find all scholarly work

– Journals, conferences, preprints, reports

– All countries, all languages, all sources

Make decisions on a per-article basis

– Good work can come from anywhere!

Idea: Universal discovery

Free to all users everywhere

– Should be able to find relevant research no matter where you live

– Don’t know where the next magic will come from

Access will depend on variety of factors

– Impact of discovery is larger than people think

Idea: Rank as researchers do

Ideal: The Stuff I Need To Know

Approximation: Relevant stuff that is likely to be good

How to estimate “likely to be good”?

– who wrote it, where it was published, how many people cite it, where citations are from

Plus usual information retrieval techniques

Idea: Automate citation extraction

Necessary to be able to scale

Much variance in citation styles

– Widely different conventions

Citations error-prone

– Desire to compress (unusual abbreviations)

– Author sloppiness + error propagation

Need to normalize citations

Idea: Rank works, not instances

Single work may have many forms/versions

– Preprint, report, conference paper, journal article

Each may be cited independently

– Need to collect citations for true import of work

Grouping versions facilitates ranking/presentation

– Collect citations for all versions – improve ranking

– Present a single work as a unit – easier to scan

Idea: Links to offline content

Only a small fraction of articles online

Libraries hold huge repositories

– Books, journals, articles, and much more

Link to library resources

– Help users find the wealth in their libraries

Support for libraries Library Links

– Links to resources in a given library

– For libraries that use link resolvers/OpenURLs

– About 325 participating libraries, growing rapidly

Library Search

– For libraries participating in OCLC’s Open WorldCat

– Find nearby libraries that have the book

– Looking to work with other union catalogs!

Library links - example

Library search - example

Library search – example

Google Scholar Coverage Commercial publishers & scholarly societies

– Fulltext from all major except Elsevier and ACS

– Includes popular papers from all publishers as citations/abstracts

Hosting services – many publishers, societies– Highwire, AllenPress, MetaPress, Atypon, Ingenta, MUSE, others

Public A&Is – PubMed, ADS– Fairly complete, no matter what you read in some reviews….

Open web and institutional repositories– Arxiv.org, Repec, pubmedcentral, others

Open access journals – all we can find (including Scielo)

Coverage by category

eng14%

soc13%

bus5%

med22%

chm7%

bio13%

unclassified6%

low confidence

4%phy12%

three categories

0%

two categories

4%

Worldwide usage

Countries with the most queries:

– US, UK, Australia, Germany, Mexico, Brazil

– Canada, China, Netherlands, India, France

– Japan, Israel, Italy, Taiwan, Spain

– Switzerland, Colombia, Nigeria, Philippines

– S. Africa, S. Korea, Malaysia, Egypt, Turkey

Reflections

Audience will expand beyond scholars

– Esp for health/medical research, maybe others

– Educated laypeople, patients, care-givers

The service is useful today for many users

– US as well as internationally

– Much more still to do to reach goals

Finally… Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost

to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.

– As We May Think (Vannevar Bush), July 1945

Hope: loss of Mendel’s laws never repeated