I use Google as my web browsing home page because I do many searches almost every day. I've just begun to explore Google Scholar but I can tell already that it will be a useful tool. I tried two quick Google Scholar searches using search terms related to this weblog ("instructional repositories" and "learning objects") and was impressed with the speed of the searches and depth of the results (1350 returns for "instructional repositories" and 170,000 for "learning objects"). About Google Scholar provides an orientation and instructions about getting the most from the search tool (http://scholar.google.com/scholar/about.html).
Much of scholarly research is learning what others have discovered and building on it. As the famous Isaac Newton quote goes, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Today we are launching the beta version of a service which we hope will help this process.
Google Scholar is a free service that helps users search scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports.
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 aren't online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.
We at Google have benefited much from academic research. This is one of the ways in which we are giving back to the research community. We hope Google Scholar will help all of us stand on the shoulders of giants.
Anurag Acharya
Principal engineer
