Google Scholar: the pros and the cons

IT may appear blasphemous to paraphrase the title of the classic article of Vannevar Bush but it may be a mitigating factor that it is done to pay tribute to another legendary scientist, Eugene Garfield. His ideas of citationbased searching, resource discovery and quantitative evaluation of publications serve as the basis for many of the most innovative and powerful online information services these days. Bush 60 years ago contemplated – among many other things – an information workstation, the Memex. A researcher would use it to annotate, organize, link, store, and retrieve microfilmed documents. He is acknowledged today as the forefather of the hypertext system, which in turn, is the backbone of the Internet. He outlined his thoughts in an essay published in the Atlantic Monthly. Maybe because of using a nonscientific outlet the paper was hardly quoted and cited in scholarly and professional journals for 30 years. Understandably, the Atlantic Monthly was not covered by the few, specialized abstracting and indexing databases of scientific literature. Such general interest magazines are not source journals in either the Web of Science (WoS), or Scopus databases. However, records for items which cite the ‘As We May Think’ article of Bush (also known as the ‘Memex’ paper) are listed with appropriate bibliographic information. Google Scholar (G-S) lists the records for the Memex paper and many of its citing papers. It is a rather confusing list with many dead links or otherwise dysfunctional links, and a hodge-podge of information related to Bush. It is quite telling that (based on data from the 1945– 2005 edition of WoS) the article of Bush gathered almost 90% of all its 712 citations in WoS between 1975 and 2005, peaking in 1999 with 45 citations in that year alone. Undoubtedly, this proportion is likely to be distorted because far fewer source articles from far fewer journals were processed by the Institute for Scientific Information for 1945–1974 than for 1975–2005. Scopus identifies 267 papers citing the Bush article. The main reason for the discrepancy is that Scopus includes cited references only from 1995 onward, while WoS does so from 1945. Bush’s impatience with the limitations imposed by the traditional classification and indexing tools and practices of the time is palpable. It is worth to quote it as a reminder. Interestingly, he brings up the terms ‘web of trails’ and ‘association of thoughts’ which establishes the link between him and Garfield.