Google Offers Google Scholar

Google has released a new search tool for academic content called Google Scholar. It's in beta, it's got its own syntax, and it is available at http://scholar.google.com/ .

You may search for a keyword or an author, using the author: syntax. The trouble with this search, however, is that some things that are indexed are citations, some of them are PDFs, and some of them are books, so you may have to use very general searches in addition to narrowed down searches because the amount of what is being indexed for each item varies so much.

A search for "geriatric cancer" found 57 results. Results are Web pages, sometimes they're just citations (in which case there's a pointer to a Web search for the article; no guarantee you'll find it, though), and sometimes they're books or PDF files. In a few cases they're PS files. In the test searches I ran I did not see any pointers to magazine articles.

Returned articles have Web links that point to those Web pages which have cited that article, which is an interesting result in itself.

Google Scholar does support some Google syntax along with its own special syntax. The syntax author: allows you to search for a specific author. intitle: and inurl: can be used to search for strings in the title and the URL, respectively. The site: syntax also works. And while I don't believe it's a real syntax, I found searching for journal: plus a potential word in a journal title (journal:cancer) worked really well.

Currently materials in Google Scholar are indexed in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. I don't know how many pages/citations are indexed by Google Scholar. (Google apparently isn't making this information public at the moment.) This is a source for which I would really like to see an alert service!

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