Google Scholar Can Now Focus Boolean Search on the Articles Citing a Given Article

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Sat, 3 Jul 2010 11:39:56 -0400

In the world of journal articles, each article is both a "citing" item
and a "cited" item. The list of references a given article cites
provides that article's outgoing citations. And all the other articles
in whose reference lists that article is cited provide that article's
incoming citations.

Formerly, with Google Scholar (1) you could do a google-like boolean
(and, or, not, etc.) word search, which ranked the articles that it
retrieved by how highly cited they were. Then, for any individual
citing article in that ranked list of citing articles, (2) you could
go on to retrieve all the articles citing that individual cited
article, again ranked by how highly cited they were. But you could not
go on to do a boolean word search within just that set of citing
articles; as of July 1 you can: http://j.mp/c74RQs (Thanks to Joseph
Esposito for pointing this out on liblicense.)

Of course Google Scholar is a potential scientometric killer-app that
is just waiting to design and display powers far, far greater and
richer than even these. Only two things are holding it back: (a) the
sparse Open Access content of the web to date (only about 20% of
articles published annually) and (b) the sleepiness of google, in not
realizing what a potentially rich a scientometric resource and tool
they have in their hands.

Citebase http://www.citebase.org/search gives a foretaste of some more
of the latent power of an Open Access impact and influence engine (so
does citeseerx http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ ), but even that is pale
by comparison with what is still to come -- if only Green OA
self-archiving mandates by the world's universities, the providers of
all the missing content, hurry up and get adopted so they can be
implemented and hence *all* the target content for these impending
marvels (not just 20% of it) can begin being reliably provided at long
last.

(SCOPUS and Thomson-Reuters Web of Science are of course likewise
standing by, ready to upgrade their services so as to point also to
the OA versions of the content they index -- if only we hurry up and
make it OA!)

Harnad, S. (2001) Research access, impact and assessment. Times Higher
Education Supplement 1487: p. 16. http://cogprints.org/1683/

Brody, T., Kampa, S., Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Hitchcock, S. (2003)
Digitometric Services for Open Archives Environments. In Proceedings
of European Conference on Digital Libraries 2003, pp. 207-220,
Trondheim, Norway. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/7503/

Hitchcock, Steve; Woukeu, Arouna; Brody, Tim; Carr, Les; Hall, Wendy &
Harnad, Stevan. (2003) Evaluating Citebase, an open access Web-based
citation-ranked search and impact discovery service
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/8204/

Harnad, Stevan (2003) Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online
Access. In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries:
Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003.
http://cogprints.org/1639/

Harnad, S. (2006) Online, Continuous, Metrics-Based Research
Assessment. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12130/

Brody, T., Carr, L., Harnad, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Time to Convert to
Metrics. Research Fortnight pp. 17-18.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14329/

Brody, T., Carr, L., Gingras, Y., Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Swan, A.
(2007) Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web:
Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics. CTWatch
Quarterly 3(3). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14418/

Harnad, S. (2008) Validating Research Performance Metrics Against Peer
Rankings. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 (11)
doi:10.3354/esep00088 The Use And Misuse Of Bibliometric Indices In
Evaluating Scholarly Performance
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15619/

Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Gingras, Y. (2008) Maximizing Research
Progress Through Open Access Mandates and Metrics. Liinc em Revista
4(2). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/16617/

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B.
& Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15617/

Harnad, S. (2009) Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research
Assessment Exercise. Scientometrics 79 (1)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joseph Esposito espositoj -- gmail.com
Date: Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 11:14 PM
Subject: New feature in Google Scholar
To: <liblicense-l lists.yale.edu>

Google Scholar now lets you see how an article was cited:

http://j.mp/c74RQs

Joe Esposito
Received on Sat Jul 03 2010 - 16:40:53 BST

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