With Google Reader gone, is Google Scholar next?
digitopoly.org
digitopoly.org
That's a big assumption. Google could axe a service tomorrow with no notice (which apple has a tendency of doing)
I don't understand the analogy, unless we are supposed to assume that there is some very large and natural cyclic pattern in Google Reader usage?
...but I'm guessing you knew that.
Also, it's not possible to discern high-quality from low-quality papers in any way. As a graduate student, I weed out what I should read by reading the titles+abstracts in the order of the amount of citations. Citation amount maybe isn't the most optimal indicator of quality but it is a strong one.
In order of importance: Scope (does it cover all journals?), Quality (how do I know if something's worth reading), Speed (I noticed your search runs a little on the slow side).
Other than that the site looks great, I'd certainly switch if you would get the basics down :)
We've talked quite a bit internally about whether to include citations counts. It's a tough call, but until we're happier with our scoring it might make sense to help bolster result reputation.
Thanks for the feedback!
I just wouldn't use your site as long as I feel _any_ journal is missing, since google does not give me that feeling.
It realize it's a rather tricky problem to fix, since not every pair of identical names is actually the same person. Doing a vanity-search on myself (http://scholr.ly/results/?q=mark+j.+nelson&x=0&y=0&#...), there are 5 profiles with precisely the same way of writing the name ("Mark J. Nelson"), but only 2 of those are me.
If that data were cleaner it'd really increase the usefulness of the profiles. May take quite a bit of magic, though.
In the meantime, I'll manually merge those profiles you've pointed out :) Thanks for taking the time!
Google has also been moving their code examples and open source to Github ( https://github.com/googlecloudplatform ), and completely ignoring their in house open source hosting.
Scholar is mostly search. Reader was a lot of things: search (like google news) sync engine, social network (like G+), a complex web app etc. It's probably a lot easier to have someone on the search team maintain scholar than it was to maintain reader and it doesn't conflict (yet) with G+.
Given how many of their famous employees were poached from academia, scholar is probably worth keeping for recruitment purposes alone. Not to mention employee morale.
As a regular user of Google Scholar, I hope you're right about the recruitment & morale purposes. But I've heard several people making a similar argument against killing Reader - it serves a demographic that Google might especially want to keep on side. That didn't appear to stop them.
Scholar is a vital tool for a lot of members of academia, not to mention Google's own research and research-heavy engineering groups. A lot of faculty---particularly young faculty and PhD students---actively maintain profiles on scholar and use it to track their own publications and citations. The minor cost of keeping it running is a small price to pay, relative to the bad blood it would generate within the research community if it is shut down.
The only reason it might survive is that google still uses it for google finance.
For example, it doesn't seem to have indexed much from ICML since 2010 (though, curiously, it indexes exactly 3 papers from ICML 2011): http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Conference/35/icml-in...
Similar story for AAAI: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Conference/251/aaai-n...
One thing that's neat about GS is that it has a negative lag instead: it's already indexing papers from a bunch of conferences that haven't happened yet, and whose proceedings aren't officially out. It finds the versions that authors post on their own webpages, or in their institutional repositories, almost as soon as they're posted. For example, you can already read a good portion of the CHI 2013 proceedings if you search on the ISBN: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22978-1-4503-...