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August 13, 2008

Google Search Results Show Metadata for Scientific Papers

Google started to integrate in the search results information about the scientific papers included in Google Scholar. Below the snippet, Google lists the authors, the number of citations and links to related articles and other versions available online. The integration is not perfect and the search results look cluttered, but it's yet another class of results that have richer snippets.

Here's the top search result for buddy tree (a data structure):


... and the same result at Google Scholar:


Google also shows additional information next to videos, books, web pages that include addresses and tests displaying metadata for forums and extracting specialized information from web pages. While Yahoo tries to convince webmasters to make structured data explicitly available, Google has a more practical approach and uses what's already available to enhance search results.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

7 comments:

  1. When will google make a scholar API available? We could make some amazing services for academics with that tool!

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  2. @Anonymous:
    What kind of functionality would you like to see in the API? Feeds for the search results?

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  3. I wish scholar search result would also include a link to bibtex entries corresponding to each article/book/etc.

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  4. At the bottom of the preferences page, you can select: "Show links to import citations into BibTeX/EndNote/RefMan/RefWorks/WenXianWang".

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  5. @Ionut: Citation information. There is no freely available API to retreive citation information on an article. I think Google does not provide this because the underlying citation corpus used is not owned by Google but by publishers like Elsevier. These publishers make money out of this. It is unfortunate because this type of information could be use to deliver personalized recommendations for scientists.

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  6. I would like to see a mechanism that would record my analysis of each item in a Google Scholar-derived research paper list. This way I could note that the particular paper was not relevant to my research or note that the paper warranted further study. In this way, an item would not have to be re-reviewed for relevance each time the search query was submitted.

    In addition new papers that hadn't been seen before, could be flagged for special attention.

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  7. @sevej have you looked at Zotero? http://www.zotero.org/

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