As an academic librarian, I’ve had to stay informed about the two major free search engines for scholarly literature. Here is a list of links to web pages, blog post, and articles I’ve found useful along the way.

Google Scholar

  1. Official Google Blog: Keeping up with recent research — GS gets pseudo date sorting “to rank recent papers … by looking at the prominence of the author’s and journal’s previous papers, how many citations it already has, when it was written, and so on.”
  2. Google Scholar and the Rise of Findability in (Re)Search (PPT) — Powerpoint presentation by Dean Giustini.
  3. Inconsistencies and flaws in Google Scholar — A few examples.
  4. Libraries and Google (Internet Reference Services Quarterly vol. 10 no 3/4) — Special issue of IRSQ.
  5. Main Articles: ‘Google Challenges for Academic Libraries’, Ariadne Issue 46
  6. E-LIS – Google Scholar : the new generation of citation indexes
  7. Google Scholar Versus Metasearch Systems
  8. Emerald FullText Article : Google Scholar: the pros and the cons — by Peter Jacso (may require subscriber access)
  9. Google’s Index to Scholarly Publishers’ Archives – A Dark Matter
  10. Peter Jacso: Google Scholar and The Scientist
  11. googleScholar_summary_0805.pdf (application/pdf Object) — UC Libraries Use of Google Scholar
  12. Scholarly Web Searching: Google Scholar and Scirus
  13. Making Google Scholar Work for You: MIT Libraries — Google Scholar FAQ for academic library patrons
  14. On Google Scholar
  15. Lost Boy: Google Scholar — Some informative notes
  16. UBC Google Scholar Blog
  17. OpenURL-enabling Google Scholar — Problems with link resolving in Google Scholar
  18. Openly’s OpenURL Referrer — Creates linkresolver links for OpenURLs in Firefox

Windows Live Academic Search

  1. Windows Live Academic Search Blog
  2. Microsoft Launches Academic Search Beta
  3. Windows Live Academic Search: The Details

(Last updated on April 24, 2006.)