Google Scholar

[Akimbo]

Akimbo submitted a new resource:

Google Scholar - Stand on the shoulders of giants

We have done Internet searches on technical subjects and had to slog through pages of social media and advertising "fluff" before finding the scholarly or case law content we need. At times like that, Google Scholar will be you new best friend.

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Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many...

Read more about this resource...

 

[Mrs. B]

It is also valuable to see the number of times a paper has been cited in other peer-reviewed papers to gauge how important the findings are, whether it is a seminal work or has only been cited a few times in obscure places.

 

[mi000ke]

It is also valuable to see the number of times a paper has been cited in other peer-reviewed papers to gauge how important the findings are, whether it is a seminal work or has only been cited a few times in obscure places.

Actually it lists any citation of an article whether the citing article has been peer-reviewed or not. It does provide a metric showing the general level of interest in an article, but not necessarily its scholarly significance (although I'm sure they are highly correlated). Of course, you can check on the scholarly significance of each citation listed to verify whether or not it was peer-reviewed. If it lists a "journal" it usually (but not always) has been peer-reviewed.

Going back many years now, I was one of the first faculty at my college to used Google citations in my tenure case. The Google citation count was significantly higher than the traditional peer-reviewed-only citation count. Fortunately the tenure committee had little understanding of the basis for the Google citation count. Now its use is fairly standard.

I actually argued subsequently that it provided a better metric of the "value" of an academic article. Any academic article that garners a high level of general ("non-scholarly") interest as well as academic interest is probably more valuable than one that is read only by a group of academics, IMHO.

Apologies for my pedantic ramblings.

 

[Mrs. B]

It’s a rough metric because a landmark study will always have a lot of citations is my point. It is helpful when doing literature reviews to see who cited it and where.

 

[Mrs. B]

The other nice thing about GS is that you can cite directly into EndNote citation manager. I always wanted to change over to Mendelay if not for that.

 

[Akimbo]

This is exactly the kind of posts that enhance a "Resource" that I was hoping for. Many thanks to all.

We are still getting a sense of how Resources will work on ScubaBoard and this sets a great example.

 

[Seaweed Doc]

Thanks for posting, Akimbo. It's worth noting that public interest will vary by field: Seaweed biology, perhaps not surprisingly, doesn't attract a lot of media attention. A lousy paper on whales can make the front page. Poorly done work on COVID will make the papers; ground-breaking work on FOP won't.

That said, I routinely refer friends to Google Scholar when they start citing "my cousin's uncle the nurse's friend who teaches middle school math that says the moon is made of blue cheese."

I really appreciate Google making this available. For those of us at smaller schools with limited library databases to search, having free access to an incredibly thorough literature search has saved me many trips to an R-I library....

It's also good for seeing if a paper WASN'T received well and subsequently pilloried. Looking at what the people that cited the paper are saying about it can be really helpful.....

 

[Akimbo]

It's worth noting that public interest will vary by field:

Agreed, it is a tool for professionals and the intellectually curious. I remember when the Web was in it's infancy and Google was looking for their first angel investor. Alta Vista was the technical search engine of choice.

 

[Seaweed Doc]

A minor complaint about Google Scholar and other lit search engines:
The search engines are having a hard time (or not trying) to filter out predatory journals and publishers. Since Beall's list faltered, it's tough to find a tool to suggest students use to filter out the junk.

For those who haven't heard the term, predatory journals refers to journals that charge authors a fee to publish but do little if any peer review. The result is a ton of untrustworthy papers from folks that couldn't get somebody else to pay for publication. (That somebody else is either libraries that subscribe to higher quality journals or granting agencies that pay to allow open access to the publication.)

 

[J_7]

Thanks. Trying to wean off google but they have some great services. Thanks for pointing this out.