google scholar. not there yet.

Given how much class time has been devoted to discussing the many aspects of Google, I thought I would find this week’s article using Google Scholar. A quick search for the key term “data sharing” (all articles) revealed a top hit for a 1994 article titled “The Bayou architecture: Support for data sharing among mobile users” (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=512726). Cited by 329 other sources, this article is a good 50 citations ahead of its closest competitor. Clicking through to the list of articles that cited the Bayou article in order of the article’s citation instances might be more useful if there were options as to how this list were arranged (say chronologically). Going back to the original search page and changing the search parameters to limit articles by date (say “since 2008”) still yields some 72,000 hits, however, in this function one can no longer see the returns based on number of citations.

In an article titled "Newswire Analysis: Google Scholar’s Ghost Authors, Lost Authors, and Other Problems," which appeared in Library Journal (9/24/2009), the author criticizes Google Scholar for other reasons: namely their poor metadata standards, and how this will effect citation numbers. He notes that because Google Scholar relies on their own algorithms rather than utilizing the metadata available through libraries. This, he argues “creates phantom authors for millions of papers. They derive false names from options listed on the search menu, such as P Login (for Please Login).”

It seems clear, that Google Scholar is a long way from having any sort of reliable measure of citation count, and also is not yet the powerful search tool it purports to be.