Google unveils beta Scholar

Google has finally revealed its hand in the scholarly research market, unveiling a beta search site called Google Scholar, which will present a major challenge to the academic publishing industry.

The Google Scholar search engine provides the last link in an emerging new model for giving users access to journal articles over the web.

It gives prominence to articles and abstracts available through open access publishing and institutional repositories, and provides a challenging alternative to existing journal publishing and electronic access businesses.

Google Scholar searches for abstracts, theses, peer-reviewed papers and scholarly literature, with its search results drawn from a wide range of academic publishers, professional societies and repositories.

During the search process, Google Scholar analyses the number of citations to each result and presents this as a separate listing. Anurag Acharya, Scholar's principal engineer, would not be drawn on the number of publishers included.

"We do cover most major publishers from broad areas of research," he told IWR.

Information professionals have responded to the new service by airing concerns that Scholar confines the role of librarian to the dustbin. But Jan Velterop, BioMed Central publisher, believes they should embrace it.

"It offers a future for them building repositories. With Google Scholar, repositories can disseminate information, which is essentially what a library is," he said.

Google Scholar looks like being a bigger headache to A&I services like ISI Web of Knowledge and the newly-launched Scopus from Elsevier. The Dutch publisher was sanguine about its new rival. Marike Westra, Elsevier communications manager, thought it presented no challenge at all: "Scopus is designed for librarians and researchers." BioMed?s Velterop countered: "This is a threat to Scopus, it is better and it is free."

Scholar also addresses a longstanding criticism of web search engines that they are unable to reach professional information from deep within the web.

Acharya said his team is "very experienced" at dealing with scholarly content. But Ed Pentz, executive director of linking specialists (and Google partner) CrossRef, warned: "Some publishers are concerned about the versions of articles that are shown in the Google results."

Google Scholar could be the key to institutional repository growth. "It makes them easier to find and to see how repositories can be a good resource," Velterop said.

"It points to a future where repositories can be linked and validated, which is a boost to OA and the way science works."

OA publishers such as BioMed Central see Google Scholar as a major ally for their cause. Velterop said: "It's a huge boost to the drive to provide open access research."