Google in the Academic Library

摘要

Google scholar, introduced in beta form in November 2004, already has everyone talking. People wonder how scholarly the material is, whether it will put commercial information retrieval systems out of business, and if it will make the library obsolete. Is it really as good as promised? The material in Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) is notjust the peer-reviewed journals available in systems like ScienceDirect, Web of Science, or SciFinder; it also includes bibliographic information about books (scholarly or not) from the OCLC WorldCat database, book reviews, and links to publishers' web sites. Occasionally, other material sneaks through, but my sample searches largely retrieved mostly relevant, relatively scholarly materials.