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38 Advisor Reviews / The Charleston Advisor / January 2011 www.charlestonco.com years (Chen, 221), Google remains closed-mouthed about the extent of its coverage––prompting scholars to comment that “Google Schol- ar could render future [studies] unnecessary and obsolete, simply by sharing a detailed description of its content collection methodology” (Neuhaus, 139). Full-text Access While the addition of the Library Links feature to Google Scholar was a positive development, it is not without some issues. Google Scholar commonly includes links to British Library Direct (BL Di- rect) beneath the articles themselves. Google has partnered with BL Direct since 2006 to provide fee-based access to articles found on- line via Google Scholar. The BL Direct link gets prime real estate on the results page and is often provided for articles that are also free- ly available online, such as those accessible via PubMed. It remains up to the savvy searcher to realize he can customize Google Scholar preferences to include Library Links and that he can access some arti- cles freely online or via a local library instead of purchasing them via BL Direct. Google Scholar’s lack of reliance on publisher metadata also means that, even when users click on Library Links, full biblio- graphic content may not transfer from Google Scholar to an individu- al institutions’ link resolver. THE UGly Ambiguous Content Perhaps the most serious problem with Google Scholar is that, un- like scholarly databases, users of Google Scholar have no idea what they are searching. “What does Google Scholar point to, cover, and index? These questions, as numerous authors have noted, have neither been made clear by Google Scholar nor by its creator Anurag Acha- rya” (Neuhaus et al, 128). As has been mentioned earlier, we have no definitive information on what sources Google crawls or how often it updates its database. Google is “almost ridiculously [rigid] when it comes to publishing full details of the scientific journals it crawls to generate its database, or to revealing details of how often those jour- nals are updated” (Winder, 10). Until Google Scholar is more forth- coming about exactly what it indexes, it will be difficult to take it seri- ously as an important academic resource. Ghost Authors Another critical error introduced to Google Scholar by the developers’ decision not to use publisher metadata is poor author name informa- tion. These “ghost authors” often take their names from other fields in the document, resulting in clearly erroneous author names such as P Login (for Please Login) or A Registered (for Already Registered). This problem has received significant coverage in the literature (see Jascó, 2009, among others); it appears that, as these errors have been spotted, reported, and published, Google’s developers have retroac- tively cleaned up the database. However, other errors remain. For ex- ample, a search in early November 2010 returned an article ostensibly written by “F Policy.” The actual article, titled “Fiscal policy, legisla- ture size, and political parties: Evidence from state and local govern- ments in the first half of the 20th century,” was written by Thomas W. Gilligan and John G. Matsusaka. These errors significantly compro- mise users’ ability to consult Google Scholar as a source for deter- mining scholarly productivity. Publication Date Errors Erroneous publication years are yet another problem with Google Scholar. Conducting an Advanced Scholar Search and limiting the fecting the search tool. For example, while Google’s simple search interface has many fans and imitators, the relatively limited advanced search options in Google Scholar and its complete lack of controlled vocabulary frustrate experienced searchers and result in noisy search- es that are almost impossible to narrow down. Other problems also exist. Relevancy Ranking The default ranking for Google Scholar results is by relevancy, rather than by date as is generally the case in academic databases. So, for example, a simple search for “mountain pine beetle” returns a book from 1985 as the very first result. Unfortunately, Google Scholar of- fers limited options for reordering and limiting the results set. Users may incorporate Advanced Search features to focus on articles from a certain date range or use pull-down menus on the results page to limit their searches to articles published since a certain year––neither of which is a particularly elegant or effective way to sort. Google con- tinues to provide no information on how articles are weighted or how relevancy is determined. Numerical Errors Innumeracy creates a significant number of errors and problems in Google Scholar. Some of these numerical challenges are painfully ob- vious. For example, searching Google Scholar for the term “the”––the most frequently used word in the English language––returns approxi- mately 8.55 million results. Adding the word “a”––another common English word––should logically result in more results. But searching for “the OR a” instead returns just 7.68 million hits. This illogical situation was explored by Jascó, who contends, “The enhancement of the content [in Google Scholar] has not been matched by improvements in the software” (Jascó 2008, 107). Be- yond concerns about innumeracy, this simple test also raises ques- tions about how well (or whether) Google Scholar handles simple Boolean searching. Inflated Citation Counts Because the developers of Google Scholar did not use publisher-sup- plied metadata, there are a number of errors in the database. One of the more egregious is the inclusion of both master records and cita- tion records for individual articles. This quirk results in multiple hits for the same article, and results in inflated citation counts that make it nearly impossible to evaluate scholarly productivity by using Google Scholar. So, for example, a search for the article, “Song recognition without identification: When people cannot ‘name that tune’ but can recognize it as familiar,” by Bogdan Kostic and Anne M. Cleary, re- turns seven versions, including two that are simply citations without links to full-text options. Coverage Confusion While it is impossible to know exactly what sources Google Scholar includes, researchers have studied the issue numerous times in the years since its launch. Early research indicated that there were signifi- cant gaps in the full-text indexing of many important serial and Open Access publications (Mayr 2008, 97); that Google Scholar’s cover- age of Open Access and scientific and medical literature was fairly strong, but that it was much weaker in other academic areas, includ- ing the social sciences, humanities, and business (Neuhaus, 138); and that there were lengthy delays between an article’s publication and its indexing in Google Scholar. While Chen’s recent research indi- cates that these areas have improved significantly in the interveningPDF Image | Google Scholar
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