Google Scholar beta

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CNET Editors' Take

Google Scholar scours scholarly journals quickly and thoroughly, although Windows Live Academic Search beta better organizes finds on its pages.

Review: The Google Scholar beta is a terrific search tool for students, teachers, scientists, librarians, and journalists seeking articles within established academic journals.

In our tests, we found that the Google Scholar beta sifts through more publications than does the Windows Live Academic Search beta (though Microsoft plans to add more sources). Google found 44,000 results when we looked up thalidomide--8,410 of those within the past few years--far more than Windows Live Academic Search's total of 1,595 finds. If you're just researching physics and astronomy, for instance, and need to weed out articles on computer

... Expand full review
The Google Scholar beta is a terrific search tool for students, teachers, scientists, librarians, and journalists seeking articles within established academic journals.

In our tests, we found that the Google Scholar beta sifts through more publications than does the Windows Live Academic Search beta (though Microsoft plans to add more sources). Google found 44,000 results when we looked up thalidomide--8,410 of those within the past few years--far more than Windows Live Academic Search's total of 1,595 finds. If you're just researching physics and astronomy, for instance, and need to weed out articles on computer science, you can narrow your searches at Google's Advanced Scholar page. There, you can also have Google look through specific journals or look for specific authors and date ranges; Windows Live offers no similar tool.



The Google Scholar beta lets you narrow down searches to specific date ranges and journals. Here, we instantly found 30 results for articles about thalidomide, published within the past two years in journals with the word nature in their title.

Use the Preferences page to make Google Scholar work best for you, such as searching only your university's library. Tell Google to hunt within the stacks at Northwestern University, for example, and a Find It @NU Library link appears next to articles in stock at that institution. Google can add a Library link for up to three institutions at a time. You can also choose to find reports in Chinese, Spanish, German, and Portuguese in addition to English. Google's Cited By link lets you jump to other referring articles; however, unlike with Windows Live Academic Search, there's no author link to let you immediately find, say, publications by one of your professors.

The Google Scholar beta also lets you display citation links to import into BibTex, EndNote, RefMan, or RefWorks. Windows Live Academic Search displays only BibTex or EndNote formats. Plus, Google provides a quick way to add its Scholar search bar to your own Web site.

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Average User Rating

2.5 stars out of 1 user review

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2.5 stars

"Find the gold between bunch of Junk." By dkcreat

Pros: Wide search, Faster, Easy & Usefull Search/Filter Options, chances of improving faster than rivals

Cons: Gives a lot junk in small screen, NO RSS!!!, No Save option, not integrated with reader(as per now), No narrowing features

Summary: When I went to Google Scholar i was very excited about it, as I always love the "Googling".I was expecting a lot help from it, such as easy to understand interface, fast & vast search, usability on the hand, & lot more.

But this time it was very bad

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Visit the developer's Web site to access this free beta service.

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