The people at Google are at it again with another useful new tool. They’re currently beta-testing Google Scholar. A search engine that will focus on academic journals, sites, and publications.
Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article’s author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.
I can see this becoming one of my favorite resources really quickly. I’m sure it’ll get some heavy use by others around SEB as well.
Found via ***Dave from whom I stole the title because I couldn’t think of a better one.
Wow you mean I might be able to search for ‘boobies’ and get information about birds and not amateur porn?!
Another hip feature of Google that y’all might not be aware of is Google Questions. They employ researchers and experts to answer any question you can ask them. It will cost ya, but it seems like it could be an awesome bail out if you were in a crunch.