Google Scholar: Search for academic articles
I was very excited to hear about the launch of Google Scholar (beta version).
From the Google site:
"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."
I had a quick look and it looks like it might be incredibly useful. Searching for a name, such as mine comes up with hits for relevant articles, listing different ways to access the article (such as ScienceDirect, Ingenta and so on. This means that if you know you can get free text access to sources via your institution, you can easily access the papers you are looking for. The results page also shows an estimate of the number of citations there are for any particular paper. I say 'estimate' because presumably it only takes account of citations which appear in papers google has indexed.
Of course, because of google's way of ordering search results, it gives an idea of the popularity of different papers. For example if you search for anorexia nervosa, the top five papers/books and citations are the following:
1. The Eating Attitudes Test: An index of the symptoms of anorexia nervosa
DM Garner, PE Garfinkel - Cited by 251
Psychological Medicine, 1979 - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
2. [CITATION]�Development and validation of a multidimensional eating disorder inventory for anorexia nervosa and � - Web Search
DM Garner, MP Olmsted, J Polivy - Cited by 419
International Journal of Eating Disorders, 1983
3. Bulimia nervosa: an ominous variant of anorexia nervosa
GFM Russell - Cited by 130
Psychological Medicine, 1979 - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
4. [BOOK]�Eating disorders: Obesity, anorexia nervosa and the person within - Library Search - Web Search
H Bruch - Cited by 164
New York: Basic Books. Eur. Eat. Disorders Rev, 1999
5. Mortality in anorexia nervosa
PF Sullivan - Cited by 90
American Journal of Psychiatry, 1995 - ajp.psychiatryonline.org - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
For more info have a look at the about page.
Read an article about Google Scholar from the New York Times
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