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Google Scholar: an outcast in the library world

Date

2008

Authors

Le, Me-Linh

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Article
Non-Refereed Paper

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Abstract

Google Scholar has been met with a range of reactions in the academic and library communities since it was introduced in beta mode in 2004. Students and researchers flocked to the site, taking comfort in its familiarity and easy-touse search box. Librarians, on the other hand, were more cautious in their approach. They were concerned not only with the secretive nature of Scholar, but with the idea that library users would begin and end their information searches with Scholar, unaware and uninterested in the wealth of information that they might be missing. In the years since then, the literature has been filled with studies on Scholar; many of them are content analyses that compare Scholar's results with a host of other search tools. After a brief introduction of Scholar, this paper will highlight a number of these content comparisons, including cases where it appears that researchers seem prejudiced against Scholar and its services. It is believed that by examining these content comparisons, it will be possible to detect a pattern in Scholar's subject strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately, this paper aims to show that Google Scholar is an undervalued search tool that has found acceptance in nearly all scholarly communities except for the library.

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Google scholar; federated searching; content analysis

Citation

Libraries and Publishing 3.0: Occasional Paper Series No. 1, October (2008) 39-44

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