Searching Scholarly Literature A Google Scholar Perspective Anurag

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/Open. URLs – About 325 participating libraries, growing rapidly § Library Search – For libraries participating in OCLC’s Open World. Cat – 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, Allen. Press, Meta. Press, Atypon, Ingenta, MUSE, others § Public A&Is – Pub. Med, 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

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