Google has become the British Empire of the web…the sun never sets on it, or at least it seems that way, since it’s hard to open the morning paper or login to a favorite news site without tripping over a Google story. One of the products Google has launched recently is Scholar, which aims at bringing to the web the contents of scholarly/academic publications in the learned disciplines. At issue here is the uncomfortable fact that a lot of web content is completely useless for anything resembling serious academic work. Since Google, as a search engine, trawls the web and since there are no editorial or methodological controls on who can publish what, the hit list on any given search is likely to bring up gems and trash in a very lopsided ratio. Scholar aims to fill this quality gap. System users can invoke this search module and be reasonably sure that the sources retrieved in response to any query will be limited to serious academic works. The Blogging Grouch has been a bit neglectful of Google Scholar, frankly, but has resolved to keep playing with it. The system has both basic and advanced search modes, and the Grouch prefers the latter, but results with the basic operation were OK. There is some background information, but it’s rather sketchy, especially on how documents get into Scholar in the first place. Some items in the results list open to full text but others so not. They take the searcher to a page with ID/password challenge. Viewed from this chair, Scholar is leagues away from the way established literature search services such as MEDLINE or CAS operate. But, Google gets roses from the BG for even trying to make academic work more generally available. More on Scholar later.
Connect to Google, and Select Scholar from the choices above the query line.