Cross-Examining Google Scholar

If you ask a typical casual information user to name her first or favorite reference source, the answer is likely to be Google, and with good reason: Google's ease of use and ubiquity have opened up a world of information that formerly was trapped within book covers in libraries. However, when it comes to serious scholarship, can Google provide adequate access to research articles? Or do librarians still need to select specialized abstracting and indexing products and teach researchers how use them? In this installment of "Taking Issues," an academic librarian and a public librarian debate the strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies of Google Scholar.--Editors Karen Antell and Molly Strothmann, Editors Chen: The topic of this column is "Is Google Scholar a reliable resource for scholarly research?" but it is not fair to discuss whether Google Scholar is a reliable resource for scholarly research without scrutinizing other resources. By singling out Google Scholar for scrutiny, we give other resources a free pass. The fact is, no resource is perfect, and every resource has weaknesses and errors. The salient question is, does Google Scholar have a higher percentage of errors or gaps than other resources? So far, we have no statistical data from empirical studies to prove that other resources have fewer gaps or errors than Google Scholar. Researchers have already accepted Google Scholar and actually use it more often than most subscription-based abstracting and indexing (AI "Google's Book Search: a disaster for scholars"; "Google Scholar's ghost authors, lost authors, and other problems. …