This presentation was given on November 17, 2009, as part of the Louisiana State University Libraries Tech Talks Series, facilitated by Digital Technologies Librarian Rebecca Miller.

1. Google Scholar in the Academic Library

2. “Stand on the shoulders of giants” Launched in 2004 Google Scholar (GS) “provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature” Essentially, GS is a metasearch tool GS claims to help “you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research” GS is still in Beta Compared with commercial databases in terms of content and searchability

3. What? According to recent research, the content in Google and GS does not “overlap greatly;” GS does crawl a specific subset of Google material: Books, citations, Word documents, PDF, HTML, conference proceedings, patents, legal opinions, etc… Google does not actually disclose, specifically, what is indexed within GS There is no list of resources crawled, and the frequency of updates is completely unknown Not a lot of full text Links to library holdings using LinkSource

4. How? No one is really sure about the relevancy algorithm, indexing, or content. We do know that the results are Relevance ranked(default) Although, you can manipulate the dates to show the most recent resources

5. features Advanced Search (how you’re searching) Scholar Preferences (what you’re searching) Categories (broad areas of research) Library Links Cited By Related Articles Web Search Exporting Citations to Bib Managers

6. benefits Great tool for verifying partial citations Open access (although not all of its content is) Like its parent, perfect for quick answers Works with a platform with which everyone is already comfortable Can be tied into individual libraries’ catalogs Shows multiple versions of a resource, at a glance

7. Problems & Drawbacks Inaccurate citation analysis & impact of scholarly material Lack of transparency in content (Apparent) unbalanced subject areas Not very powerful search/lack of search features (compared with commercial databases) No definition of categories/subject areas

8. Google Scholar is already out there. Our job is not to do battle with it, but to teach our students how to use it wisely… --Badke, 2009 It is a perfectly decent search tool for those who are looking for quick answers and for questions that have little or no impact on clinical excellence… --Vine, 2006

9. Most research agrees… Google Scholar cannot replace or really be used independently of other, commercial databases (unless the researcher is simply looking for a “quick” answer) GS, nonetheless, is a valuable tool when used as part of an overall research plan or cadre of research tools

10. So, what do we take away from this? Should we include GS in instruction/one-shots? Why/why not? When do we turn to it on the reference desk? Philosophically, what will it do to users if they see us using GS, rather than a library database? How do we answer questions about comparing GS and library databases? Other thoughts/questions?