The Search Principle blog

What are this year’s most memorable developments in search? Share your opinion with me whether you are a librarian, a physician, or a web surfer.

After searching evidence-based sources for health information, what do you search next? Do you try Scirus? Google? Healthline? Mammahealth? Others here? Give some context for why you make the choices you do.

Regular Google is a better choice for very current “known item” searches (ie. specific articles at journal websites, those in the deep web, PubMed) than Google Scholar. For older books, Scholar may have an advantage because it links to print holdings in local libraries.

However, all told, Google Scholar is a bit disappointing. Is Google Scholar the least improved search engine of 2005 (though still in beta)? What is your opinion? Post a message below. You never know when the Google Scholar folks might be listening.

UBC Google Scholar Blogger
Dean Giustini

It seems the Google boys (Sergey Brin and Larry Page) have research interests beyond search algorithms and supercomputing. According to the Washington Post’s David Vise in his new book “The Google Story”, Brin and Page want to fuse science, medicine and technology in a way never before imagined.

More Google hype? In chapter 26, “Googling your genes”, author Vise outlines how super-rich Google might one day help scientists analyze the vast amounts of raw data from the U.S. Human Genome Project (HGP), completed in 2003 (to search some of this data, see: Human Genome Resources

). Google’s data-mining techniques appear well-suited to the challenges posed by analyzing genetic sequences in the HGP.

Google will be part of a whole new era of personalized medicine where searchers can “google their own genes”, says Vise. Once your genetic code is precisely located, doctors can help to recommend lifestyle changes for you, and treatments for certain diseases to deal with the notion of “human genetic individuality”. Better medical care, if you ask me.

To think it could be “searchable” on Google boggles the mind.

Dean Giustini
UBC Google Scholar blogger

Try my new guide: Searching for Grey Literature

Grey (or gray) literature has historically been difficult to identify and obtain. There are two reasons for this problem: 1) much of the grey literature is unindexed or unpublished (often both); and 2) greylit is locked deep within the “hidden or invisible” web, and unsearchable. However, as greylit becomes easier to find in the emerging era of open access, its importance is likely to increase. My guide is meant to provide some assistance to those in scholarly environments wishing to extend their research to this important literature.

For those of you interested in finding your research fast, browse relevant government or institutional websites directly. Increasingly, institutional repositories (IRs) – such as the University of Toronto TSpace – place faculty publications freely-accessible online. Much of this material is indexed by Google Scholar and Scirus. For systematic reviews of the literature, several search engines that crawl different portions of the Web should be searched as “one-stop searching” does not (yet) exist.

Dean Giustini
UBC Google scholar blogger

In a move that search engine analysts will see as “backtracking” to its traditional area of “search”, Google has renamed its controversial Google Print project “Google Book Search”. Nothing like lawsuits to generate bad PR and a change of heart (or, at least a change in name – in beta).

Speaking of heart, see this search on Stroke prevention and drug therapy

or this one on Aboriginal health in Canada

.

Stay tuned for a related editorial tomorrow entitled: “The rise of findability in searching and decline of bibliographic control” and the implications of these trends on searching for health information for consumers and scholars.

Dean Giustini
UBC Google Scholar blogger

Ever imagine what Hippocrates might say to William Osler in heaven circa 2005?

This week in the New England Journal of Medicine, the following correspondance . . . And a Diagnostic Test Was Performed. My colleague, Marcus Banks, who is librarian at the New York University School of Medicine (and writes about open access and Google scholar) and I have been watching this search trend for some time. We’ve been trying to ascertain the exact moment when the paradigm shift gathers momentum – when physicians and residents start to use “Google” for making their choices and clinical decision-making. Is this the future of evidence based practice?

I’d like to thank my clinical librarian friend, Vicki Lee, in Vancouver BC for pointing out this correspondance. I must admit it took me by surprise. The physician who wrote the letter asks a good question: where is the new Google world leading us? Surely a trend to watch – this is why I blog. bye for now. Dean

Dean Giustini
UBC Google Scholar blogger

Health professionals need to stay current with what’s happening in medicine (see my “Current Awareness Page” for traditional SDI tools used in my classes).

Last month, some doctors, pharmacists and nurses at Vancouver hospital were asking about the recently-enabled PubMed’s RSS feeds. Can RSS feeds be used to stay current? (To my knowledge, Google scholar does not offer SDIs or RSS feeds. Correct me if I’m wrong via email.)

Now it seems podcasting is on the medical agenda. Podcasting is a means of distributing audio and video programs via “feeds”, much like RSS text/web-based updates. Podcasts are searchable @ podcast.net.

Medical professionals – and health librarians – are educating themselves about podcasts, particularly in CME and reading the literature. Will health professionals one day prefer to “hear about” new research via iPods, rather than searching for the literature in MEDLINE & Google Scholar?

ps. Meanwhile, the experimental search tool – Speechbot – using voice-recognition to search transcripts from thousands of files of audio has failed. According to rumours, Google is working on some kind of voice-activated searching.

Dean Giustini
UBC Google Scholar blogger

1. Acharya – “Searching scholarly literature: a Google scholar perspective”

– Google scholar’s principal engineer Dr. Acharya said to a group of international medical librarians that GS is growing exponentially, and provided some figures about content: medicine (~22%), engineering (~14%), biology and sociology (~13%), physics (~12%). Is one to assume that the humanities and social sciences make up the remainder?

– Acharya also says that “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”. Really? Most librarians find this hard to believe.

2. Bailey Bibliography Extends to Google Print Controversy
– “free” selected English-language electronic works about the Google Print controversy, with a special focus on legal issues.

3. Jasco – The Future of Citation Analysis
– Jacso asserts that “Google Scholar (GS) does a really horrible job matching cited and citing references”; the full article is printed in the Scientist.
– Jacso’s detailed analysis and comparison of the best citation tools aside, do our users really care that Google scholar has problems with accuracy, quality control and duplicated results? No, they don’t. Jacso misses the point (though many librarians will appreciate it, and I do too).
– Users want easy access (ie. using a free service) to citation information. They want to browse; they want links to related research, and free content. What they don’t want is a long explanation of why they must use the Web of Science and Scopus.
– Health librarians will contextualize when to use/or not use Google scholar, one hopes.

Dean Giustini
UBC Google scholar blogger

Google has announced its so-called Google Librarian Center.

“Librarians and Google share a mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. We support librarians who work each day to further that mission. This page is a first step toward improving and expanding that support.”

At the moment, this is just another Google “concept” without legs. A mailing list is being set up for librarians to share their “teaching tips”, handouts and lesson plans that we’ve prepared related to Google.

How inclusive. Google is finally tapping into bibliographic power~!

Dean Giustini
UBC Google Scholar blogger

Comparing results of sample searches in Google Scholar against three fee-based article indexes — PsycINFO, Social Science Citation Index, and ERIC — this article looks at content, currency, relevancy & overlap. GS yields more results and a greater variety in its types of sources along with a higher rate of relevancy but less currency. See:

Susan Gardner Susanna Eng, Gaga over Google? Scholar in the Social
Sciences, Library Hi-Tech News, 22, 8 (2005) pp. 42-45.

You can take a peak at the pre-print “A look at Google Scholar, PubMed, and Scirus: comparisons and recommendations” written by Eugene and me for publication in the Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries (CHLA/ABSC) Association.

Dean Giustini
UBC Google Scholar blogger