Google Scholar as a tool for discovering journal articles in library and information science
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521011036972 |
| Pages | 250-262 |
| Published date | 20 April 2010 |
| Date | 20 April 2010 |
| Author | Dirk Lewandowski |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Google Scholar as a tool for
discovering journal articles in
library and information science
Dirk Lewandowski
Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to measure the coverage of Google Scholar for Library and
Information Science (LIS) journal literature as identified by a list of core LIS journals from a study by
Schlo
¨gl and Petschnig.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper checked every article from 35 major LIS journals
from the years 2004 to 2006 for availability in Google Scholar. It also collected information on the type
of availability – whether a certain article was available as a PDF for a fee, as a free PDF or as a
preprint.
Findings – The paper found that only some journals are completely indexed by Google Scholar, that
the ratio of versions available depends on the type of publisher, and that availability varies a lot from
journal to journal. Google Scholar cannot substitute for abstracting and indexing services in that it
does not cover the complete literature of the field. However, it can be used in many cases to easily find
available full texts of articles already identified using another tool.
Originality/value – The study differs from other Google Scholar coverage studies in that it takes
into account not only whether an article is indexed in Google Scholar at all, but also the type of
availability.
Keywords Search engines,Information science, Libraries
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
As searching for scientific literature changes (see OCLC, 2006; Lewandowski, 2006;
Nicholas and Rowlands, 2008) one can see that users often prefer general-purpose web
search engines over specialised search services offered by libraries or database
providers. However it is not only the web search engines that offer an alternative, but
also specialised scientific search engines offered by search engine providers, such as
Google, or scientific publishers, such as Elsevier. Libraries now compete with a lot of
different search systems such as Scirus and Google Scholar, just to name two.
From the libraries’ perspective it is important to offer solutions that go beyond
indexing traditional library contents to also include content from the web
(Lewandowski and Mayr, 2006; Lossau, 2004). Regarding user experience, librarie s
also try approaches that are derived from web search engines (see Sadeh, 2007). The
main problem lies in guiding the users who are not familiar with high-quality resources
and are not able to formulate advanced search queries to results suitable for their needs
(Lewandowski, 2008).
In this paper, we will study Google’s approach to the scientific search engine.
Launched in late 2004, Google Scholar (GS) was not the first to open parts of the
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OIR
34,2
250
Refereed article received
6 February 2009
Approved for publication
13 October 2009
Online Information Review
Vol. 34 No. 2, 2010
pp. 250-262
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684521011036972
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