Google Scholar

Goggle unveiled a new search engine just for scholarly material. According to their website, "Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

"Just 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. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications."

As with the rest of Google, it comes with Google syntax such as author: . And if you want to include an article you've written in this search database, Google has this recommendation: "Please try to choose a URL that is likely to be valid for a long time to come. For example, a Digital Object Identifier link on dx.doi.org. DOIs are permanent names for articles and are managed by CrossRef."

An article about Google Scholar appeared in yesterday's NY Times and is available at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/18/technology/18google.html?oref=login .

Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com