Google and the scholar: the role of Google in scientists' information‐seeking behaviour
| Pages | 282-294 |
| Date | 20 April 2010 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521011036990 |
| Published date | 20 April 2010 |
| Author | Hamid R. Jamali,Saeid Asadi |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Google and the scholar: the role
of Google in scientists’
information-seeking behaviour
Hamid R. Jamali
Faculty of Psychology and Education, Tarbiat Moellem University, Tehran,
Iran, and
Saeid Asadi
Department of Library and Information Science, Faculty of Humanities,
Shahed University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to demonstrate the role that the Google general search engine plays in the
information-seeking behaviour of scientists, particularly physicists and astronomers.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on a mixed-methods study including 56
semi-structured interviews, a questionnaire survey of 114 respondents (47 per cent response rate) and
the use of information-event cards to collect critical incident data. The study was conducted at the
Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College, London.
Findings – The results show that Google is the tool most used for problem-specific information
seeking. The results also show the growing reliance of scientists on general search engines,
particularly Google, for finding scholarly articles. Initially, finding scholarly articles was a by-product
of general searching for information rather than focused searches for papers. However, a growing
number of articles read by scientists are identified through the Google general search engine and, as
scientists are becoming more aware of the quantity of scholarly papers searchable by Google, they are
increasingly relying on Google for finding scholarly literature.
Research limitations/implications – As the only fields covered in the study were physics and
astronomy, and the research participants were sourced from just one department of one institution,
caution should be taken in generalising the findings.
Originality/value – The data are based on a mixed-methods in-depth study of scientists’
information-seeking behaviour which sheds some light on a question raised in past studies relating to
the reason for the high number of articles identified through Google.
Keywords Sciences, Searchengines, Information retrieval,United Kingdom
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Web search engines are probably the most important means of retrieving information
for web-based information systems. Among the major search companies, Google has
gained a reputation as one of the leading and most popular search engines. In 2006 in
the USA there were 91 million queries searched daily on Google alone. The total
number of queries searched daily on all search engines was 200 million (Sullivan, 2006).
Besides being fast and user-friendly, Google’s popularity is mostly due to the
relevance of the retrieval results for a typical query. In other words, recall and precision
are often high for Google’s search results. By implementing the PageRank algorithm
(Brin and Page, 1998), Google introduced citation models in web search in order to
improve the quality of search results. Tracking web citations became possible because
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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OIR
34,2
282
Refereed article received
26 May 2009
Approved for publication
22 November 2009
Online Information Review
Vol. 34 No. 2, 2010
pp. 282-294
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684521011036990
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