NEW: Google Scholar

[TechZ]

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature.

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[NooNoo]

Thats a keeper!

[TechZ]

+1 for teh Tech News Section then

[confus-ed]

..Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar ..

..is busy collecting your usage information & leaving lots of cookies & whatnot whilst all the time making out they are doing you a favour !

Plagurists are gonna love this one

Yet another cheap way to get some decent content ! [/end cynical mode .. though with Google I'm not so sure I can ]

Being a touch more serious though it still suffers form this

.As search engines become more intelligent, they are beginning to focus on many new ranking criteria. Link popularity means that the more external links that are made to your website, the more popular your website is perceived to be, and thus the higher it will rank. Link Popularity constitutes approximately 50% of Google's ranking algorithm. ...

There's a phrase for this, I can't think what it is .. where only 'good' (in googles eyes) links 'promote' other Google links etc - in real life I ain't so happy with this approach, but in accademic terms its worse still, as often you want to get beyond someone else's or everybodies 'accepted position' & work it out yourself & come up with some unique perspective yourself, or at least find some of the more 'off beat' stuff..

But it will lead to a lot of folks thinking that some things are far more valid than they really are, as someone who can get his stuff on a 'big site' in the first place is instantly far more credible than some other guy who wrote his own unique stuff & hosted it himself, even though the little guy stands just as much chance of being 'valid' as anyone else..

(..think about all that stuff Billy Boy Gates tells you & 'claims' - & then think how much time we here spend saying he's just wrong ! )