The Search Principle blog

Peter Jacso is a well-known LIS professor who has turned out a long list of seminal pieces on the utility of meta-search tools, Google scholar, citation tracking tools such as the Web of Science and Scopus. His scholarly work is among the best in the field of information retrieval, meta-searching and the pros/cons of search engines.

The thrust of a lot of Jacso’s criticism of Google scholar has focused on its lack of transparency, poor standards, overblown citation counts and a multitude of retrieval problems resulting from poor treatment of data in source documents: author names such as “F. Password“, for example, number in the ‘hundreds of thousands’ and contribute to skewed and unreliable results (and now skewed data and results for the h-index). Date ranges are confused with other numbers in documents (such as ISBNs), making date-range searching an exercise in frustration and futility.

What I like about Jacso’s recent contribution entitled “Google scholar revisited” is his excellent summary of the highs and lows/pros and cons of GS since 2004.

Some highlights:

1. Google scholar still has basic search and software deficiencies, and its inability to provide options to searchers (ie. managing citations and output) is an enormous failing. ‘Shoddy’ says Jacso.

2. Jacso includes a comprehensive bibliography of important opinion and research pieces since Google scholar’s debut. Note Canadians on the list, Barsky, Giustini and Vine.

3. Jacso points out how much GS has grown, how much content it now indexes, and reminds us that Google Books are included now. Jacso points out how useful GS is in helping researchers find ‘needles in a haystack’ and various pre and post-prints.

4. Jacso labels the confusion caused by deficiencies in the GS database and search software as “illiteracy” and “innumeracy”. I hope Anurag Acharya is listening.

5. Most importantly, Jacso says that the enhanced content in GS has not been matched by improvements to the software.

I am grateful to have such a rigorous critique of a search engine that, for all its initial hype and excitement, has ultimately failed to deliver a credible alternative to our proprietary databases.

That said, three years on, what would we do without Google scholar when it comes to finding known-items and engaging in unproductive web browsing? Compared to some of the other ways in which we waste our time on the web (ie. Twittering), Google scholar doesn’t seem so bad. At least it hasn’t been monetized.

Some excellent ideas on this web 3.0 presentation by Marta Strickland of Organic Inc. I’m especially loving slides 3, 5, 13, 15 and 27. Have a good weekend all. Dean

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I am proud of the fact that I graduated from UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), and that I am able to interact with SLAIS students. This interaction and collaboration keeps me enthused about and on top of new information trends, especially web 2.0 technologies.

We are in the early stages of creating a new online course on social software, and I’ll be getting help with its design. As an early step in the process, I’ve been looking around on the web, building my resources and examining best approaches to designing a course on web 2.0 for librarians. Several, key names recur in this area, such as Amanda Etches-Johnson, Ellyssa Kroski and Meredith Farkas – they’ve already successfully designed courses.

So, what are the essential elements of social software for student librarians? Do we focus on tools, the social processes that underpin their use, or examine both? What’s possible in a 13-week course? One paper written by Noa Aharony at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel asks some important questions about integrating web 2.0 principles into LIS education.

She says:

“[I] recommend that the different issues and applications of Web 2.0 be thoroughly taught as a separate course in the LIS curriculum and not as partial topics in another course. Expanding the curriculum will equip new generations of librarians with competencies and skills that fit a modern, dynamic and changing work environment. This course should include theoretical explanation as well as practical experience of the various applications of Web 2.0 such as: blogs, wikis, RSS, flickr, collaborative favorites, tagging and Folksonomies, instant messages, social networks etc.”

I tend to agree with Noa in that the LIS 2.0 course will, of necessity, focus on practical as well as theoretical learning perspectives. It is crucial that we find meaningful context for web 2.0 and its core philosophies in our work as information professionals. I look forward to taking on that challenge in this new course.

In this month’s Scientific American, an interesting piece entitled simply “Science 2.0“. It is written by M. Mitchell Waldrop, an editor at Nature. What’s special about this article is – in the spirit of web 2.0, collaboration and participation – readers were invited to comment on a draft here: www.sciam.com/science2pointO

It’s true that everyone is using versioning these days. Think of this trend as periodization. Look closely at the ideas that spring forth from the websites and articles using the “2.0” label. Science 2.0 refers to “new practices of scientists who post raw experimental results online, discuss nascent theories and share their ideas and papers with other scientists to see and comment.”

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Some other ideas I think are great in the Science 2.0 piece:

1) Risk of being scooped – the downside to openness; someone stealing your ideas, and eventually your patents!
2) Peer review – this new version of Science as described needs a reputation-management system, a central database responsible for tracking the reputation of those in online communities.
3) Blogs & wikis don’t replace journals – though they are great replacements for hallway chat, they don’t replace the journal as a mechanism for scholarly communication.
4) Information may be hard to find – making information available doesn’t mean it will be found. Hallelujah.
5) Breaking down isolationism in science – Web 2.0 has shown some potential in opening science to everyone, across disciplines, outside of tenured faculty and academic silos.

Earth Day….Some excellent links and follow-up information for bloggers on the EBM and Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC.

The NLM Technical Bulletin has announced that MEDLINE has reached a significant milestone in that it now has passed the 15 million mark. It is also reporting that, if you count the retrospective indexing of pre-1966 citations, that MEDLINE went over 15 million citations about a year and a half ago – in December 2006.

So how many citations are in PubMed, which includes OLDMEDLINE and the out-of-scope materials? Is it eighteen (18) million yet? Or, still at about 17 million??

Dr. Anita Palepu and I presented this talk at the BCLA Conference on April 19th, 2008, a year to the day of the launch of Open Medicine. What a great year it was, working with the likes of Palepu, Kendall, Choi, Murray, Loubani, Willinsky, etc.

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Top Five (5) Ways for Librarians to Contribute to Open Access (OA) Movement

1) Increase your own knowledge of OA issues; visit Open Access News daily;
2) Support OA by developing ‘information kits’ in your library organization to raise general awareness of open access principles and practices;
3) Develop ‘self-archiving‘ process to increase records in local repositories;
4) Show your solidarity by featuring open access journals on your library website (thanks to John Willinsky for that idea); do displays; handouts; presentations etc.
5) Deposit papers and presentations into E-LIS – the open archive for librarians and information specialists, or other digital archive – PubMedCentral, for example.

Earlier in the week, a number of bloggers picked up on the Open access entry I revised and added to for the UBC Health library wiki; we’ve had an incredible surge in interest with more than 1000 viewings. One reader, however, e-mailed to suggest that the entry include materials beyond text – post-text – to non-textual knowledge objects and scholarly materials freely and openly-accessible on the web.

Here’s an early list (any other suggestions??):

. Podcasts and Videocasts – medicine only
. Geospatial data, and projects like Google earth
. Google research; Google print;
. Genome information at NIH;
. Clinical datasets; patient data;
. List of Open source software packages.

Often, I am sent links to tutorials of various kinds from the academic library community, and many of them are well-prepared and presented.

Eastern Michigan University Library has developed an excellent video series for its user community regarding topics as diverse as welcome to the library, finding things on the library’s website, tips on searching Google scholar and even retrieving materials from robotic storage. Most of the videos are 2-3 minutes long.

The reason this series is so useful is that each video is concise, clear and personalized to EMU students. I suggest embedding and comment features for all videos (like the Youtube one above) which would allow students to share these videos with each other, and provide input/feedback mechanisms.