Welcome to The Search Principle blog. It’ll take a while (for me and you) to get used to this new space. Do you like the new design?
Last week, I spoke to a group of librarians about Google scholar. I get weary talking of Google but realize it’s incredibly influential. However, I’ve branched out into other areas in my information practice and try to keep up with web 2.0 and web 3.0 issues, not to mention teaching and learning concerns.
That said, I do see Google scholar as an important browsing tool – and part of what might be called an ideal ‘pre-search’ tool. But what is a pre-search tool?
Use pre-search tools to orient yourself, to browse, ask questions and get acquainted with topics. Who are the leading authors in a given field? What articles are seminal? Pre-search as a concept is also applicable to Wikipedia. Think of mother Google this way (i.e. presearch) as well.
Both Google scholar and Wikipedia can confidently be called ‘pre-search’ tools. Let’s convince our faculty users who ban Wikipedia for undergraduate research that much can be learned by using these tools and critiquing them against better sources. It’s part of media and information literacy in the digital age.
There’s only one problem: recently, Wikipedia has gotten very technical on us (mentioned by Joho) and – gadzooks – removed its web 3.0 entry.
Why are murky topics (even those where there is so much disagreement) removed from Wikipedia (and other general wikispaces)? And why are some articles morphing into uncharacteristically long, discursive treatises? From my point of view, that’s not Wikipedia’s main function or purpose.
In the meantime, I hope users find their way to our entry on web 3.0 at the UBC Health Library wiki. ~Dean Giustini
References
1. Rankin, Virginia (1992). Pre-search. School Library Journal (Vol. 38, Issue 3, p. 168-171).
3 replies on “Wikipedia & Google Scholar as “pre-search””
[…] comments from Dean Giusini, UBC Biomedical Branch librarian at Vancouver hospital, from his Wikipedia & Google Scholar as “pre-search” post yesterday on The Search Principle […]
if you are using google scholar our article “on the robustness of google scholar against spam” might be interesting for you. we have analyzed how difficult it is to spam google scholar and manipulate e.g. citation counts. in short: it is very easy. accordingly it might make sense to use data from google scholar (especially citation data) with care. read here the full article: http://sciplore.org/blog/2010/06/12/new-paper-on-the-robustness-of-google-scholar-against-spam/
Unlike Google Scholar, which crawls the web for academic content, Windows Live Academic Search works closely with publishers and uses structured feeds to build its index. As such, all content accessed through the service comes directly from a trusted source—namely, the publisher of a scholarly journal.