Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

When in doubt, Google is where we scout. But if your needs are more academic and educational in nature, point your browser to Google Scholar (www.scholar.google.com) instead. This digi-librarian is a Google sub-set search engine for academic and scholarly material in all fields. It allows you to sift the grain from the chaff by specifically searching a treasure trove of academic literature, including peer-reviewed journals, theses, books, abstracts, technical reports and preprints, from all broad areas of research. You can dig up articles from an extensive range of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities. Nuggets of academia that get trampled and buried by the sheer volume of data that regular search engines throw up.

Google Scholar does not make a real world library obsolete--it expands your access to global altitudes by mining through vast amounts of data all at once. Though still in beta, its advantage lies in the fact that it is quite unlike a lot of other academic databases and libraries on the Web that are either clunky or limited. Scholar has a simple, tidy interface. It is not fee-based and there are no ads or pop-ups to mar the interface. It offers virtually unrestricted one-stop access to articles in subscription journals (though often only through abstracts), institutional repositories, open access journals, and e-print servers.

Google Scholar includes bibliographic information about books (scholarly or not) from the OCLC WorldCat database. The OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) database is an online catalogue of books, journals, and other materials held by thousands of OCLC member libraries. Google Scholar also analyses and extracts citations, even if the documents they refer to are not online. So your search results may include citations of articles and works that appear only in books or other offline publications.

On the downside, Google Scholar can churn up information that may not be considered scholarly, like press releases and calendars. And from the point of view of the librarian, it lacks a power search and the ability to search on fields like ISBN, and sorting by publisher, author, or dates etc.

Google Scholar is by no means perfect. Yet, what makes its appeal stronger than its rivals like CiteSeer (which focuses on computer science and infotech) and SmealSearch (which concentrates on business), are its inclusive abilities and broader spectrum of focussed searches.