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27 Feb 2006

Will "Google Scholar" beat the "Web of Science" in future ?

Friends,

Just revisited Google Scholar last week. Noticed that it has improved a lot. Searched for "OpenMED@NIC" . It gave 925 hits. Not bad considering that OpenMED@NIC has around 1015 documents. What facinated me was that it presented link "Cited by" along with the hits. Clicking those showed all the articles citing an article in question in OpenMED@NIC.

No wonder Dean Giustini of Biomedical Branch Library, Vancouver Hospital Health Sciences Centre, writes in his blog an item - Google Scholar Rivals Web of Science comparing Web of Science with Google Scholar. He refers to an article by Daniel Pauly and Konstantinos I. Stergiou entitled "Equivalence of results from two citation analyses: Thomson ISI’s Citation Index and Google’s Scholar service. ETHICS IN SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS, 2005:33–35 Published December 22.

"Citation counts were performed across a wide range of disciplines using both the Thomson ISI files and Google Scholar, and shown to lead to essentially the same results, in spite of their different methods for identifying citing sources. This has strong implications for future citation analyses, and the many promotion, tenure and funding decisions based thereon, notably because ISI products are rather costly, while Google Scholar is free."

However one thing irritates me - it shows the following text in hits of OpenMED@NIC.
"@import url(http://openmed.nic.in/eprints.css"
Google could have done better to render the CSS better from the Eprint based repository.

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