And this makes sense. When libraries track their holdings,
they track a combination of titles and issues. It's not
enough to say that you have Brain, you add that you have it
from 1996 to the present. Google knows they're crawling
Science Direct (and from the publicity we know it too), but
they can't say or don't want to take the trouble to say
which Elsevier journals or what years are picked up in each
crawl.
We used to complain a lot about aggregators, that their
holdings changed constantly, but in fact that seems to be
increasingly true of the major journal publishers as well.
Journals jump merrily from Oxford to Blackwell to Cambridge
to Wiley. Sometimes the backfile stays at the old site,
sometimes the new publisher sets up a complete archive
(Oxford in particular seems to be using that as a way of
wooing journals). Google's policy allows them to avoid all
that nuisance.
- Jim Campbell
Digital Access Librarian | Librarian for German
University of Virginia Library | Charlottesville, VA
22904-4112
513 Alderman | campbell virginia.edu |
434-924-4985
-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounceswebjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounceswebjunction.org] On Behalf Of Corey
Murata
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 6:04 PM
To: web4libwebjunction.org
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Which databases can Google Scholar
crawl?
Here's Acharya's answer from a 2006 interview
(http://www.google.com/librariancenter/articles/0612_0
1.html):
*************
TH: Why don't you provide a list of journals and/or
publishers included
in Google Scholar? Without such information, it's hard for
librarians to
provide guidance to users about how or when to use Google
Scholar.
AA: Since we automatically extract citations from articles,
we cover a
wide range of journals and publishers, including even
articles that are
not yet online. While this approach allows us to include
popular
articles from all sources, it makes it difficult to create a
succinct
description of coverage. For example, while we include
Einstein's
articles from 1905 (the "miracle year" in which he
published seminal
articles on special relativity, matter and energy
equivalence, Brownian
motion and the photoelectric effect), we don't yet include
all articles
published in that year.
That said, I'm not quite sure that a coverage description,
if available,
would help provide guidance about how or when to use Google
Scholar. In
general, this is hard to do when considering large search
indices with
broad coverage. For example, the notes and comparisons I
have seen about
other large scholarly search indices (for which detailed
coverage
information is already available) provide little guidance
about when to
use each of them, and instead recommend searching all of
them.
**********
Cm
--
Corey Murata
Collection Assessment Projects Librarian
Business Computer-based Services Librarian
University of Washington
Box 353224
Seattle, WA 98195
(206) 543-4360
muratau.washington.edu
Roy Tennant wrote:
> Yes. I have personally and directly asked Anurag
Acharya and got nowhere. He
> suggested that we try to determine coverage by throwing
searches at it.
> Roy
>
>
> On 2/19/08 2:32 PM, "Bill Drew" <drewwtc3.edu> wrote:
>
>
>> Has anyone approached Google asking for this
information?
>>
>> Bill Drew
>> _______________________________________________
>> Web4lib mailing list
>> Web4libwebjunction.org
>> http://lists.we
bjunction.org/web4lib/
>>
>
>
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