Abdeckung und Aktualität des Suchdienstes Google Scholar

The paper discusses the new Google search service Google Scholar. This search engine, which is intended for searching exclusively scholarlydocuments, will bedescribed with its most important functionality and then empirically tested. The study is based on queries against different journal lists: journalsfrom Thomson Scientific, Open Access journals (DOAJ) and journals of the German social sciences literature database SOUS as well as the analysis of result data from Google Scholar. The study shows deficiencies in the coverage and'up-to-dateness of the Google Scholar index. Furthermore, the study points up which web servers are the most important data providers for this search service and which information sources are represented. We conclude that Google Scholar has some interesting potentials (e.g. citation analysis) but can not be seen as a substitute for the use of special literature databases due to a couple of weaknesses (e.g. transparency).