Something new from the Google Scholar today. It’s a feature that
has been requested by many users. You can now search within sets cited
articles, legal opinions, and law journals.
The
Google Scholar Blog has more but let’s run through a search using
this new option.
1. Run a Google Scholar Search
using any of the features you normally use. Since this post is about
citation indexing, let’s use what is one of the first, if not these
first article on the topic of citation indexing. The paper, “Citation
Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through
Association of Ideas,” by the father of citation indexing, Dr.
Eugene Garfield. It was originally published in Science (122.3159)
in 1955.
1A. Google Scholar has the full text article from several
publications available for free. Interestingly, we had to go through one
page of results to the 11th entry to find the actual reprint of the
article appearing on Dr. Garfield’s web site. You might think this would
be the first result not number eleven. While many sites provide free
access to the article others do not. How does an end user know which one
to select when they see multiple versions of the same article?
2. Let’s continue as a typical search might do by using the first
result in the results list, a reprint of the article from a 2006 issue
of International Journal of Epidemiology. It will take two clicks*** to
get to the full text. Here it
is. It’s absolutely worth reading.
3. Now, go back to the Google
Scholar results page and in the lower left corner (below the
snippet) look for a link that reads, “cited by” and then a number. In
this case, “cited by 788.”
4. What’s new today is that once you click on the cited by
link not only do you find
links to the 788 articles in the Google Scholar database that cite
Dr. Gafield’s 1955 article. In addition to the articles you’ll also see a
checbox directly below the search box that if checked/ticked allows you
to search within those 788 articles.
5. Check the box and search
for the word “librarian” in those 788 articles. We found approx.
167 hits.
Example 2: If we limit the search to the phrase “scholarly
communication” we found three hits.
Finally, we wanted to see how many and what type of articles cite
Garfield and use
the word tenure or the phrase academic tenure”. The answer, approx.
97. However, seeing duplicated titles at number five and six out of
about 100 results each with a different number of versions is just
confusing.
6. If you use the advanced search box, you should see word
“references” (bottom of the first section) followed by the paper you
selected earlier. Of course, you can change or remove it at anytime. If
you prefer using Google search operators, they”ll also work as you know
from any Google Scholar search box.
Now that wasn’t difficult and the added functionality provides a lot
more research power to see how Dr. Garfield’s seminal paper has been
used/discussed/cited during the past 55 years.
7. All of the “search within” features we’ve been discussing also
work when searching opinions and legal journals.
Example: Brown
v. Board of Education, or 347
US 483 – Supreme Court 1954.
You see that this historic case has been cited 23,708 by other
materials in the Google Scholar database. Now, select “search within”
(below the main search box) and run a search. We searched
“Detroit Public Schools” and received approx. 147 hits that appear
in other opinions, law journals, other types of journals and books.
Sources: Google Scholar Blog and ResourceShelf
*** When we ran the search it appears that there are no stopwords [of, by, for, in, and so on]. Even
letters within words are highlights. Click
the first result and you’ll be able to immediately se[e] what we [saw?]
From The Resourceshelf