Scientists get their own Google.
Imagine searching the Internet and being able to restrict your results to academic texts. Today Google launched a free search engine that aims to do just that. Google Scholar searches only journal articles, theses, books, preprints, and technical reports across any area of research. A test version of the search engine is available at http://scholar.google.com, so you can try it out. In a search for the phrase "human genome", for example, a normal Google web search throws back 450,000 or so hits, with genome centres and databases and other websites ranked top. In contrast, Google Scholar returns just 113,000 hits, and all the top-ranked items are not websites but seminal papers on the subject. In fact, the number one hit is the landmark article "Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome" published in Nature in 2001.
I did my own work research on this today and found a relevant paper (the free version) in a few minutes! Here's how it works:
Much of the peer-reviewed material has been made available to Google by publishers, including Nature Publishing Group, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, through a pilot cross-publisher search engine called CrossRef Search.
Publishers have arranged for Google robots to scan the full texts of their articles. Users clicking on a hit returned by Google Scholar are directed to the article on the publisher's site, where subscribers can access full text and non-subscribers get an abstract or information on how to buy an article.
Google Scholar has a subversive feature, however. Each hit also links to all the free versions of the article it has found saved on other sites, for example on personal home pages, elsewhere on the Internet.
Subversion feature. Hmm. In the words of the immortal Instapundit, heh.
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