Google Scholar vs commerciele wetenschappelijke databases

Xiaotian Chen in Serials Review met "Google Scholar's dramatic coverage improvement five years after debut".

"This empirical study found that more than five years after its debut in November 2004, Google Scholar is able to retrieve any scholarly journal article record from all the publicly accessible Web sites and from subscription-based databases it is allowed to crawl. From February to April 2010, four hundred randomly selected records of scholarly journal articles from eight databases were used in test-searching Google Scholar. Only two records were not retrieved by Google Scholar. The result was 100 percent retrieval for six databases and 98 percent for the other two databases. This is a dramatic improvement compared with some below 50 percent coverage found in 2005. With this kind of coverage improvement by Google Scholar, information professionals should reevaluate its value and values of subscription-based abstracts and indexes".

Waarom Scholar na 7 jaar (!) nog steeds een betaversie is, blijft echter een raadsel.