The Search Principle blog

Dr. Ann Harzing – a Professor in International Management at the University of Melbourne – e-mailed to tell me about two projects: 1) Publish Or Perish, a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations; and, 2) a white paper Reflections on Google scholar.

Despite a barrage of criticism of GS, particularly its coverage secrecy, poor standards in building its database, messy data, problems with duplication (shall I continue?) – all librarians should ask: why do academics and students use GS? Is it because they are interested in citation tracking comparisons to and/ or as a companion tool with ISI’s Web of Knowledge/ Science? What would Dr. Peter Jacso, someone whose opinion I respect, say about that notion? Is using GS as a citation tracking tool as good as guessing, or less?

In any case, Dr. Harzing’s program is intended to empower academics in building their promotion and tenure cases. Harzing is interested in using Google Scholar in her field of management and its related disciplines, where only a small fraction of the journals (typically US-based) are ISI listed.

Are other fields likely to find Google scholar a good complement to Web of Science?

From time to time, journalists call and ask me for a quote. I’m pleased with the one in this article from Government HealthIT:

Health care eyes Web 3.0: Forget wikis and blogs — are you ready for the Semantic Web?

The article is written by Brian Robinson and he captures the essence of the next wave in the web’s development. Cheers, Dean

1. Allan Cho – won the 2007 Bill Fraser Prize in medical librarianship, is a blogger, has worked in hospital libraries and is publishing.
2. Megan Wiebe – has worked with wikis, at BMB Library and published a paper about grey literature in JCHLA.
3. Robert Stibravy – has worked in medical libraries, participated on the wiki team, and is ready to transform academic libraries.
4. Amber Christensen – Amber is a reference librarian at the Saskatoon City Hospital, a position she secured before finishing LIBR534.
5. Niki Baumann – Niki is a virtual reference librarian at the B.C. ELN. Niki worked in several medical libraries during her time as a graduate student.

Other newly-graduated librarians that Greg and I could mention include award-winning archivist-librarian Elisheba (Sheba) Muturi who took LIBR534 in 2005, Duncan Dixon and David Milner. Talk about an embarrassment of riches.

1. Finally, Reed Elsevier (aka Elsevier), one of the online publishing powerhouses with over 15,000 journals in business, education, medicine and science will now permit Google scholar to crawl its journal content. (See story). What are the implications for libraries?

2. For one, Google scholar will now be a huge database, much larger than its closest free, open competitors such as Microsoft’s Academic Search or Elsevier’s Scirus.com (300 million citations).

Any guesses how big GS will be once it trawls Elsevier‘s e-vault of journals? Think in the range of 800 million to one (1) billion citations. Mammoth!

3. In conjunction with Mother Google, Google scholar has gradually found its niche in academic circles as a needle-in-the-haystack search, verification and browsing tool. Some academic librarians suggest Google scholar is a good first place to look when scholars are short on time, but stop short of recommending it. Why is that? (See Jacso’s pronouncements.)

4. As a federated search tool, this study and this study suggest that Google scholar performs better for some searches than Metalib and students prefer it. (Could ease of use and speed be the reasons?) Organizations buying MetaLib will need to teach it next to Google scholar and demonstrate why it’s any good, or risk what I call “student zone-out”.

5. Regular, vanilla Google is not enough (and its results are getting less reliable) for basic searches. Google scholar – if used in an intelligent, targeted way – can help academic librarians find their way to a bibliographic core in most disciplines, but increasingly in the sciences thanks to today’s announcement by Elsevier.

My question is: when do you come out of beta, Google scholar?

Yesterday, I blogged briefly about the UBC Health library entry for the new iPhone (see below) and polymath Paul Levinson left a brief message for us. (See the Wikipedia entry on Paul.)

I don’t know your books (though I will now find your book about the Cellphone) nor can I refute the assertion you make that the iPhone technology, as you described it, dates back to 1979 (wasn’t it the TV program “Get Smart” – just kidding).

However, your blog(s) and your website are full of interesting information so I have some homework to do. Perhaps I could convince you to be interviewed for this blog about the future of mobile communications?

Dean Giustini
GS blogger
2007 Canadian Hospital Librarian of the Year

Over at the UBC Health library wiki, I have started a page of relevant links to new information about Apple’s just-released iPhone and its applications in medicine and medical searching. Feel free to add your own two cents.

Enjoy!

ps. Keep in mind that Canada won’t see the iPhone until 2008 at the earliest. 🙁

I’ve been hearing the rumours – and thinking it can’t be right. Now that the announcement is out – it is an insult to health librarians everywhere. Without a single librarian – one of our own – on the Google Health Advisory Group, our profession is effectively silenced on one of the more important projects for our work since PubMed.

Shame on you Google. The Medical Library Association (MLA) should be especially annoyed at this oversight by the world’s most influential search engine, and a letter should be written to Page and Brin forthwith. MLA, please tell us this is a clerical error? Google, for its part, should really take a lead from Microsoft and try to understand the symbolism of its decisions before it excludes health librarians.

Readers, do you think Adam Bosworth knows who we are? Do you think he knows about the thousands of librarians and information specialists in hospitals, clinics and consumer health libraries across the globe who work hard to teach and use their tools to deliver health information to patients every day of the year?

The announcement suggests not:

“[Google Health has] formed an advisory council, made up of healthcare experts from provider organizations, consumer and disease-based groups, physician organizations, research institutions, policy foundations, and other fields. The mission of the Google Health Advisory Council is broadly to help us better understand the problems consumers and providers face every day and offer feedback on product ideas and development.”

Imagine what the American Medical Association (AMA) or the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) (in short, the doctors) would have said had they not been asked to participate? The newly-formed Google Health Advisory Group mostly consists of MDs, with some representation from health provider and consumer groups – but no hospital librarians, no clinical librarians, no consumer health librarians or informationists. In fact, no nurses, no therapists nor technologists. It’s a list that surprises by its one-dimensionality, and its errors of omission.

Note to Google: Who do you think provides patient education and materials to consumers? It’s nurses. It’s health librarians. In the information age, librarians are equal partners in the delivery of health care, in case you haven’t noticed. Who do you believe is responsible for delivering information to patients outside of the clinical team? Further, who knows these tools better than health librarians?

Your stock among health librarians has plummeted today. Tut tut, Google Health.

In a following up to yesterday, this message from a reader:

“It seems to me that Rothman is talking about social search engines and Barsky-Cho about “social search browsing“, similar, complementary but distinct notions.

You [in your post] are talking about the aggregation and assimilation of metadata for the semantic web in the same way that PageRank aggregates links for findability in Web 1.0/2.0”.

The question is where are controlled vocabularies in the equation? What role do they have in the semantic (Web 3.0) web?

Digital, virtual socialization – using social software tools like Flickr, YouTube and even Facebook – is producing a different kind of knowledge-creation and a new means of wayfinding in the Internet age. Think about this activity as a Web 2.0 version of marking up cards in our old card catalogues. Remember how valuable that information was to scholars? Can librarians learn from this increase in online socialization (and information-sharing) by our users? How can librarians use this meta-cognitive data to bring better organization and findability to our experience of search?

David Rothman’s post today, in response to Barsky-Cho’s article Introducing Web 2.0: Social Search for health librarians, got me thinking about the notion of other mashups – for example, combining tools like Connotea with Google Scholar. Combining Skype and del.icio.us. Think of the search possibilities when we leverage the social.

In his post, Rothman asks why Barsky and Cho mention Flickr and YouTube as examples of social search as they are not designed as such – a fair question. But in the absence of some agreement of what we mean by social search (see definitions), it makes sense to open up all social software tools to their potential in wayfinding.

Algorithmic search – exemplified by Google PageRank since 1998 – now seems, in 2007, passe and inadequate to our emerging digital needs on the Web. Think about the ‘lack of satisfaction’ we get from search results in Google these days. With the extraordinary rise of end-user tagging, linking, rating and mashing information, librarians need to think creatively about how to leverage this data for better wayfinding and findability. This is what I think Barsky-Cho are implying (but they need to be more explicit in expressing this fact next time).

I am afraid that technology experts believe that this ‘meta’data is unusable because it is an artefact of the mob, and indicative of wisdom of crowds. In some cases, it’s also a product of spam. (David has been an advocate for better editing policies at AskDrWiki based on having experts-only access to changing entries – which I am not so certain about myself, though I agree in principle.) Will the semantic medical web be organized by doctors, information specialists and librarians alone? Let’s hope not…

I think it’s central to our futures as librarians to consider moving beyond self-limiting discourses, and definitions. We need to consider true mashups of our shifting, liminal ideas around social software in order to do what we do best – creatively opening access and leading our users to information with whatever means we have at our disposal, including blogging about these ideas (for which I thank Rothman et al.)

So, who has a good definition of social search?

Dean Giustini
UBC google scholar blogger

I am half-way through my year off. I put the final touches on my paper Friday for ADHE 542 – Fostering Learning in Practice, a course full of tough theory, but I stretched my own intellectual boundaries (and the learning theories) by applying them to social software, namely blogs and wikis.

In the last paper, I interrogated the learning theories of Tara Fenwick within the context of wikis. Here’s a section:

“I argue that ‘wiki-ing’ is grounded in a constructivist paradigm (Bartlett-Bragg, 2006). By providing the technological and social context for knowledge-creation, librarians can engage in a reflective process on a wiki, and can interact and encourage each other’s learning there. I argue that wikiing is rooted in the theories of Dewey (1933), Piaget, Vygotsky (1978) and other constructivists. Wikiing can be reframed as digital learners creating their own knowledge by adding new information to their previous knowledge, and those of their peers, which they leave like evidence for all to see. Constructivists believe that learning is strongly impacted by context, and I argue that this is true in the digital wikian context.”

Librarians using social software are advised to make some initial attempts at reading constructivist theories. It’s important to ensure that we make decisions about using technology grounded from a theoretical perspective because it will ensure our users’ cognition, not merely because it’s trendy. I’m going to submit these papers for publication, but I’ll leave other samples here over the week if you are interested.