Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price give us an overview of Google Scholar. A few quick facts to supplement their about page.
- Google won’t say what it does and does not consider “scholarly”. My search turned up lots of books which then allowed me to do either a “library search” [worldcat, natch] or a web search [Google] for the title which I found strange.
- no ads on Google Scholar pages
- Some citation linking, some full text, same old problem of getting a good cite and then hitting a subscription database wall.
Upshot? Don’t know. As a public librarian, I find less and less reason to dig around in scholarly archives. On the other hand, just as I fear that WorldCat searching will become inaccurately synonymous with “find it at a library” I don’t want to see this filling in for “find it in a research paper” Librarians know the difference, does everyone else?