Is The Scholar Be-ta Than Databases?

My last two blogs have, in some way, dealt with Google regarding the American Revolutionary, John Hanson. Today’s blog will deal with Google Scholar, along with traditional library databases. It was recommended by my professor that we as Library and Information Students know about Google Scholar. For the first time this year, I used it to obtain and print an article needed for my Research class. While I found Google Scholar very simple and quick to use, I didn’t know much about it. So that I might familiarize myself with Google Scholar I did a little research about this popular resource. What follows is what I learned about Google Scholar and its impact on traditional library databases.

Google Scholar is a beta product that was introduced to the world in November 2004 (Howland, Wright, Boughan, & Roberts, 2009). Upon first reading the words “beta product,” I had no clue what they meant and so I went to find out. Technically, a Beta device or application isn’t considered to be a mature product (“Wiki” “Answers,” 2010). A Beta device has been through internal company review and error testing, but it hasn’t been thoroughly tested by people outside of the developmental team (“Wiki” “Answers,” 2010). Now, having the meaning of “beta product,” I was able to further understand Google Scholar.

Next, in the article “How Scholarly is Google Scholar? A Comparison to Library Databases,” the researchers pose two questions. The first question they asked was if Google Scholar result sets were more or less scholarly than licensed library database result sets (Howland et al., 2009). The second question the study posed was does the scholarliness of Google Scholar vary across disciplines (Howland et al., 2009). What the researchers found was that Google Scholar is, on average, 17.6 percent more scholarly than materials found only in databases and that there is no statistically difference between the scholarliness of materials found in Google Scholar across disciplines (Howland et al., 2009).

Moreover, the key to Google Scholar’s success is relevancy ranking and a large universe of information (Howland et al., 2009). A database is limited to its defined title list of content, whereas Google Scholar, by its very nature, is open to a much broader set of content that aids the researcher (Howland et al., 2009). Up to this point, many library databases have defaulted to sorting by date rather than by relevancy (Howland et al., 2009). The fact that many databases are now adding relevancy search options seems to indicate that Google Scholar got it right in the first place (Howland et al., 2009). It appears that Google Scholar has done a better job of both precision and recall than library databases have (Howland et al., 2009).

Bottom line, the results from this study left me surprised and very impressed. Apparently, Google Scholar is going very strong and is here to stay. A part of me wishes that I had done “more thorough” research of this topic before I wrote my last two blogs. In my defense, however, Google was the resource up for debate and not Google Scholar. Despite the debate, Google Scholar appears to be a credible resource that will only continue to grow and improve.

References

Howland, J.L., Wright, T.C., Boughan, R.A., & Roberts, B.C. (2009). How scholarly is google scholar? A comparison to library databases. College Research Libraries, 70 (3), 227-234.

Answers.com (n.d.). Retrieved from WikiAnswers:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_does_BETA_mean