Librarian Of All Trades (and master of some)

The latest issue of College & Research Libraries (May 2009) has an article entitled “How Scholarly is Google Scholar? A Comparison to Library Databases.” Long story short, they found that Google Scholar comes up with better results than library databases.

Color me unsurprised. I’ve been using Google Scholar as a “federated search” tool for at least two years and I’ve yet to be dissatisfied by the quality of the results it pulls up.

What we do is route Google Scholar through EZ Proxy and let Article Linker (Serials Solutions OpenURL product) hook the Google Scholar Search results directly to the full-text in whatever database we have it in.

What bugs me is that we do not systematically teach the use of Google Scholar. There’s some resistance to the notion. Indeed, our “splash page” for Google Scholar used to strongly discourage students from using it, saying that it’s unreliable and less useful than going through the individual library databases. That’s not even close to the truth!

My favorite quote: “If Google Scholar contains much of the content available in library databases, why shouldn’t students begin where the most content exists?” (The downside is that that content isn’t always within the first 30 search results, and students are known to stop looking before the fourth page of search results.)

Here are some interesting factoids from the article:

• Their methodology involved using subject-specialist reference librarians as judges of scholarliness, using a rubric based on some pretty standard criteria. They compared the first 30 results from each search in Google Scholar and an array of standard licensed databases.
• Google Scholar contained 76% of citations contained in the licensed databases. Licensed databases contained only 47% of citations contained in Google Scholar.
• Citations unique to Google Scholar were rated 17.6% more scholarly than citations found unique to a licensed database.