Google Scholar and the Researcher

With the arrival of Google Scholar (GS) a few years ago, students gained a metasearch engine for academic research that initially appeared to be as accessible as Google. As the GS site announces, "From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books,

abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations." Google Scholar's growing popularity within academia speaks to its potential as a viable research tool.

Yet GS presents certain unique challenges to the user. Unlike regular Google, a large proportion of the results are not available as open access full text. Curiously, while GS codes some of its results by type, there is no way to sort results into separate lists for books, articles, and citations. While the GS results are ordered by Google's algorithmically based version of relevance ranking, there is no way to re-sort the results by date or any other ordering system. There is a "Recent articles" link to be sure, but it does not sort in strict, descending date order, nor does it separate articles from books. What's more, Google doesn't disclose what's in GS. We know that some publishers are not represented, but there is no overall list of participants. We don't even know the full scope of publishers that are included. Thus, GS does not truly represent the whole world of research at your fingertips.