4/22/2005
confession time
I have a confession to make, one that should make me horribly ashamed as a librarian if some others in the field are to be believed (most noteably, the one who is visiting SLIS on Monday afternoon).
My favorite source for scholarly articles is Google Scholar.
I know, I know, as a librarian there are so many research sources that are theoretically better and more robust, and it’s not like I hate ABI/Inform and D&B Million Dollar and Factiva now. They’re all great databases, and I’ve found a lot of useful information in all of them, both for myself and others. Work would have been a much bigger headache this semester if I’d had to do it without D&B and S&P.
Nonetheless, when I need a last-minute article on, say, the history of medical subject headings, and Proquest, Ebsco, and Wilson are all yielding nil, and when a simple keyword search for “history of medical subject headings” gives me exactly the article I need, and nearly at the top of the search page…I can’t help but be impressed.
Of course, Google Scholar has limitations; you don’t get the full-text access most of the time that comes with most subscription databases. The indexing isn’t as thorough. On the other hand, Google is accessible to everyone, and is a great resource for libraries who may be unable to afford the often prohibitively expensive commercial databases.
But mostly I love it because I can almost always find what I’m looking for.
Filed under: Librarianship
