Schoogle

Every academic list I am on, and quite a few blogs, have been giddy all day over Google’s new scholarly-only site: http://scholar.google.com. I’m not the only one to notice that blogs seem strangely absent, but occasional and working papers, self-hosted, seem to appear. Actually, that’s not entirely true. For example, one of my blog postings showed up because it was referenced in a conference article.

I’m talking about this paper: “An Outsider’s View on ‘Topic-oriented’ Blogging” (pdf), which, not surprisingly perhaps, is relevant to my own work. I think one of the real impacts of the new world of scholarly communication is that forward-linking (you know, trackbacks) are going to be as common as backward linking. That way, you can crawl forward through a literature rather than just backward (though for various reasons it may still make more sense to go backward).

But the more interesting question has to be: Does this special concentrated version of googlejuice become pretty valuable to academics? Is this yet another system that is just asking to be gamed? I showed my chair the site, and a few hours later he was walking around the department with a ranking of our faculty by number of hits. Luckily, this didn’t leave me on the bottom. While I am “underpublished,” this particular impact factor actually measures things like conference papers and notes of thanks from authors and editors.

Now I just have to ask myself if including this in my tenure package a few years down the road is going to mark me as too weird for tenure, or is going to be required.

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2 Trackbacks

  1. By Ponderance on 11/19/2004 at 3:25 am

    Google Scholar Redux
    … it will increasingly be the reponsibility of all academics to ensure that students develop the critical skills necessary both to Google well (pagerank is not an academic measure, after all!) and to look beyond the Googleplex, no matter how encompas…

  2. By Blog de Viajes on 11/19/2004 at 11:33 am

    Google Scholar y las nuevas formas de construir relevancia
    Ayer hablábamos de Google Sholar, el buscador de Google específicamente destinado al ámbito científico y académico. Una de las cosas más interesantes que tiene es no sólo podemos acceder a textos que coincidan con nuestra búsqueda temática, si…

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