Google Scholar: Difference between revisions

From OpenWetWare
Jump to navigationJump to search
(bugs)
(tips)
Line 15: Line 15:


From what one can guess, articles are ranked mostly by citations weighted by who cites, i.e. 1 citation from PLoS Biology is worth more than 1 citations from the Antarctic Journal of Aquaculture. Because of this ancient articles are often among the top hits. A [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cancer search for cancer] returns a 1981 papers first as of March 2015. It is therefore useful to use the year restrictions to get to the recent papers.  
From what one can guess, articles are ranked mostly by citations weighted by who cites, i.e. 1 citation from PLoS Biology is worth more than 1 citations from the Antarctic Journal of Aquaculture. Because of this ancient articles are often among the top hits. A [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cancer search for cancer] returns a 1981 papers first as of March 2015. It is therefore useful to use the year restrictions to get to the recent papers.  
=== Tips ===
* author:c darwin [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=author%3Ac+darwin] and don't dare to try autho'''u'''r. It's not flexible enough to tolerate British English.
* site:plos.org [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=site%3Aplos.org]


=== Bugs ===
=== Bugs ===
Line 21: Line 25:


=== See also ===
=== See also ===
* [https://www.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html Google's help page]


[[Category:review]]
[[Category:review]]
[[Category:software]]
[[Category:software]]
[[Category:literature]]
[[Category:literature]]

Revision as of 03:49, 2 April 2015

Google Scholar is a search engine for scientific publications, case law, and patents. Unlike PubMed it includes an estimated citation count and is more tolerant to search terms like misspelled author names and titles.

Pro and Con

+ more tolerant than PubMed to bad search terms and search terms including issue and pages numbers

+ searches patents in addition to published articles

- Google hides how articles are ranked, biasing subsequent reading and citing

- fewer hits are peer reviewed and are thus of slightly lower average quality compared to PubMed

Ranking of articles

From what one can guess, articles are ranked mostly by citations weighted by who cites, i.e. 1 citation from PLoS Biology is worth more than 1 citations from the Antarctic Journal of Aquaculture. Because of this ancient articles are often among the top hits. A search for cancer returns a 1981 papers first as of March 2015. It is therefore useful to use the year restrictions to get to the recent papers.

Tips

  • author:c darwin [1] and don't dare to try authour. It's not flexible enough to tolerate British English.
  • site:plos.org [2]

Bugs

Occasionally, real articles are just completely missing from their database for obscure reasons. Try Rahman08 NEJM (PMID 18305268) or Tsokos11 (PMID 22129255).

See also