An exploratory study of Google Scholar

Purpose – This paper2 discusses the new scientific search service Google Scholar (GS). This search engine, intended for searching exclusively scholarly documents, will be described with its most important functionality and then empirically tested. The focus is on an exploratory study which investigates the coverage of scientific serials in GS. Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on queries against different journal lists: international scientific journals from Thomson Scientific (SCI, SSCI, AH), Open Access journals from the DOAJ list and journals of the German social sciences literature database SOLIS as well as the analysis of result data from GS. All data gathering took place in August 2006. Findings – The study shows deficiencies in the coverage and up-to-dateness of the GS index. Furthermore, the study points up which web servers are the most important data providers for this search service and which information sources are highly represented. We can show that ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Philipp Mayr, Anne-Kathrin Walter
• Keywords: CORR 2007, Education, Google Scholar, Search Service, Service Google Scholar