

The Gentleman Who Made Google Scholar - soundsop
https://medium.com/backchannel/the-gentleman-who-made-scholar-d71289d9a82d

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Al-Khwarizmi
As an academic that works in a research area where other indexes (like WoS,
etc.) have really bad coverage, and as an academic that has a double surname
and accented characters which other indexes handle terribly wrong and end up
creating many duplicate profiles with a few papers each, I feel very grateful
for the great tool that is Google Scholar.

Additionally, thanks to it and its recommendation system I have found many
interesting papers that I wouldn't have read otherwise.

I really hope that Google keep maintaining this tool for many years.

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afandian
You should get yourself an ORCID and encourage your publishers to include it
in their metadata (it can be updated even after publication). You can also
provide a list of publications on your profile.
[http://orcid.org](http://orcid.org)

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Al-Khwarizmi
Yes, ORCID is also a good tool. It handles accented characters and non-US
names well, and it lets you add your own publications, which makes it much
better than e.g. WoS/ResearcherID. It has a much narrower scope than Google
Scholar though, as to my knowledge it doesn't compute bibliographic
information like h-index, etc (which sadly is a need in the metrics-oriented
world of applying for positions and grants) and doesn't provide recommendation
functionality or search for paper PDF's.

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afandian
Of course, ORCID is trying to solve the particular problem of identifying
authors and linking them to publications. Other tools generate metrics based
on metadata. If more people use ORCID, then the quality of the data that those
tools can use is improved.

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chubot
I love Google Scholar... I'm not an academic but use it multiple times a week.

One thing I've always wondered is why it has "cited by" but no forward
citations? Is that a copyright issue?

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Blahah
Copyright cannot apply to facts, like the entity relation "paper X cited paper
Y". So this is not a copyright issue.

However, publishers maintain databases of citations to which they sell access.
Such databases are protected under sui generis database rights in many
countries (e.g. EU, Russia, but not USA) - these are automatic property rights
that recognise the effort of compiling a database, similar to but distinct
from copyright (in that they don't have to involve any creativity).

Because there is no sui generis database right in the USA, I doubt that's the
reason either - perhaps google just don't consider it a priority.

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dalke
It's extremely unlikely that such database rights are an issue as ISI
(Institute for Scientific Information, now part of Thomson Reuters) has been
compiling this sort of data since 1960, as well as many other indexing
services.

If database rights were an issue then they would have sued each other already
and settled things long before Google Scholar.

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Shooti
More wood behind arrows or not they could at least update the black bar so
Scholar could be pinned to the users App Launcher. And no reason for it to
still have the old Google Logo.

It doesn't have to _feel_ abandoned just because its niche.

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pXMzR2A
This is also an interesting project
[http://libgen.org/scimag/index.php](http://libgen.org/scimag/index.php)

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pmoriarty
I prefer CiteSeerX

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/)

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abhgh
This is one tool I am truly grateful for! I work in the industry as a
researcher and Scholar is invaluable.

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the_arun
Didn't know Google Scholar uses different search algorithm. Thanks for sharing
this article.

