What is rather remarkable is that Google is actually disrupting the academic publication business… even though it is almost certainly not profitable for Google to do so.
Sometimes I wonder if Google, being in the position of influence and resources it is in, does things just to see what will happen and what new opportunities such disruption will create for it.
Just wanted to say I enjoy reading your blog and it has also motivated me. I have recently starting placing some of my own research code on GitHub. With the majority of work accessible online, it only makes sense to provide working code when applicable. If nothing else, it should at least make other researchers more likely to cite your work as it is easy to use and compare against.
Now that I have access to Scopus, I can see that Scopus, probably, has a worse scope than Google Scholar (for computer science). Microsoft Academics search suffers from the same problem as Scopus: their assortment of journal and conferences is very limited. It is true that Google does index technical reports, which some people argue is bad, but it is actually useful as well.
Don Boyssays:
Enjoy hearing about things academic and otherwise. Again recommend you try sourdough and Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson is a good start. I don’t like dealing with a hot pot out of the oven, so I shape the dough into boules in lined baskets (California Baking Institute), and put them onto a thick stone in the oven with a pizza peel.
As for woodworking you should take a look at a fellow Canadian at http://www.theunpluggedwoodshop.com
He, as I, are really into hand tool work.
Thanks for keeping me alert. At 72 I need it.
Don
John Regehrsays:
I agree that Google Scholar is great, but I’m curious what you mean by “disrupt.” The basic definition from Christensen doesn’t apply in any strict sense. What is being disrupted and how?
You are right that I don’t use the word disrupt in the pure Christensen sense, but I don’t think I am far off. Your school probably pays to grant you access to major indexing systems such as Scopus, Web of science, the ACM digital library and so on. These tools are professionally curated and considered “high quality”. Meanwhile, Google provides a cheaper alternative that is, formally, not nearly as good… but ends up being, in practice, much better.
Would you seriously consider using Scopus to do a lit. survey?
From an information retrieval point of view, what the Web taught us is that coverage is more important than precision, at least in open world settings. I prefer to have some junk in the results, if it means I’ll get more of the important results.
I do have an oven stone, and it works great for pizzas, but for bread, I have found that cooking the bread in a pot gives me a better crust and more oven rise. I see very little downside to using a hot pot. Sure, you could burn yourself, but I’ll gladly sacrifice my health for good bread.
Thanks for the woodworking reference. I do use simple power tools, but I would love to do away with them. For now though, in all honesty, I mostly do simple and practical things. I do want to get into more sophisticated things, but there are so many simple things that I need to do first… for example, I still need to build a bread box.
John Regehrsays:
Hi Daniel, of course Scopus would be an absurd choice for a CS literature search. In fact I just gave it a try and it was terrible.
I’ll buy that Google Scholar can help disrupt the scholarly indexing business.
Mostly, however, I just use Google for literature searches, not Google Scholar. The latter is, as you point out, a nice way to track authors.
Actually all I really want is an RSS feed for every researcher. This feed should show one entry every time the author publishes a paper.
Don Boyssays:
My stone is 1″ thick and has sides. http://www.hearth-oven.com/. I have no trouble with oven rise and crust. I know that most pizza stones are rather thin.
I usually make 2 kg of dough and bake in two loves, one after the other. Use a wood peel to place loaves into oven, metal to handle once in the oven.
Bread Baking an artesian’s perspective by DiMunzio is a great book if you want a good understanding of the process from a more scientific view. It really is a textbook, but it helps you understand how the parts go together.
The New Traditional Woodworker by Jim Tolpin is a great start for getting into hand tools.
Google integrates the results from Google Scholar… I just tested it by googling one of your highly cited papers (HLS: A framework for composing soft real-time schedulers), and the regular Google result sets tells me how often it was cited. So I would argue that if you are using the regular Google, you still benefit from Google Scholar.
I think it is fantastic that Google is able to out-compete librarians and publishers with respect to science indexing. For one thing, there is no money in it for Google… For another, publishers are almost certainly resisting Google as much as they can.
It is my understanding that Google can’t provide RSS feeds for researchers due to licensing issues. Maybe Google would not offer RSS feeds even if they could, but I am quite sure they would offer something better than email notifications.
Sometimes I wonder if Google, being in the position of influence and resources it is in, does things just to see what will happen and what new opportunities such disruption will create for it.
Thanks for the book recommendation!
Just wanted to say I enjoy reading your blog and it has also motivated me. I have recently starting placing some of my own research code on GitHub. With the majority of work accessible online, it only makes sense to provide working code when applicable. If nothing else, it should at least make other researchers more likely to cite your work as it is easy to use and compare against.
Now that I have access to Scopus, I can see that Scopus, probably, has a worse scope than Google Scholar (for computer science). Microsoft Academics search suffers from the same problem as Scopus: their assortment of journal and conferences is very limited. It is true that Google does index technical reports, which some people argue is bad, but it is actually useful as well.
Enjoy hearing about things academic and otherwise. Again recommend you try sourdough and Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson is a good start. I don’t like dealing with a hot pot out of the oven, so I shape the dough into boules in lined baskets (California Baking Institute), and put them onto a thick stone in the oven with a pizza peel.
As for woodworking you should take a look at a fellow Canadian at http://www.theunpluggedwoodshop.com
He, as I, are really into hand tool work.
Thanks for keeping me alert. At 72 I need it.
Don
I agree that Google Scholar is great, but I’m curious what you mean by “disrupt.” The basic definition from Christensen doesn’t apply in any strict sense. What is being disrupted and how?
Your blog has been a compelling read over the last year. Looking forward to more of the same in 2013.
Cheers!
@John Regehr
You are right that I don’t use the word disrupt in the pure Christensen sense, but I don’t think I am far off. Your school probably pays to grant you access to major indexing systems such as Scopus, Web of science, the ACM digital library and so on. These tools are professionally curated and considered “high quality”. Meanwhile, Google provides a cheaper alternative that is, formally, not nearly as good… but ends up being, in practice, much better.
Would you seriously consider using Scopus to do a lit. survey?
@Itman
From an information retrieval point of view, what the Web taught us is that coverage is more important than precision, at least in open world settings. I prefer to have some junk in the results, if it means I’ll get more of the important results.
@Don Boys
I do have an oven stone, and it works great for pizzas, but for bread, I have found that cooking the bread in a pot gives me a better crust and more oven rise. I see very little downside to using a hot pot. Sure, you could burn yourself, but I’ll gladly sacrifice my health for good bread.
Thanks for the woodworking reference. I do use simple power tools, but I would love to do away with them. For now though, in all honesty, I mostly do simple and practical things. I do want to get into more sophisticated things, but there are so many simple things that I need to do first… for example, I still need to build a bread box.
Hi Daniel, of course Scopus would be an absurd choice for a CS literature search. In fact I just gave it a try and it was terrible.
I’ll buy that Google Scholar can help disrupt the scholarly indexing business.
Mostly, however, I just use Google for literature searches, not Google Scholar. The latter is, as you point out, a nice way to track authors.
Actually all I really want is an RSS feed for every researcher. This feed should show one entry every time the author publishes a paper.
My stone is 1″ thick and has sides. http://www.hearth-oven.com/. I have no trouble with oven rise and crust. I know that most pizza stones are rather thin.
I usually make 2 kg of dough and bake in two loves, one after the other. Use a wood peel to place loaves into oven, metal to handle once in the oven.
Bread Baking an artesian’s perspective by DiMunzio is a great book if you want a good understanding of the process from a more scientific view. It really is a textbook, but it helps you understand how the parts go together.
The New Traditional Woodworker by Jim Tolpin is a great start for getting into hand tools.
@John Regehr
Google integrates the results from Google Scholar… I just tested it by googling one of your highly cited papers (HLS: A framework for composing soft real-time schedulers), and the regular Google result sets tells me how often it was cited. So I would argue that if you are using the regular Google, you still benefit from Google Scholar.
I think it is fantastic that Google is able to out-compete librarians and publishers with respect to science indexing. For one thing, there is no money in it for Google… For another, publishers are almost certainly resisting Google as much as they can.
It is my understanding that Google can’t provide RSS feeds for researchers due to licensing issues. Maybe Google would not offer RSS feeds even if they could, but I am quite sure they would offer something better than email notifications.
@Don Boys
Thanks for the great references.
Daniel, agreed, the Google / Google Scholar integration is cool.
Let’s face it, almost everything about the academic publication industry and process sucks. Pretty much any kind of disruption is good.
“Why is Google doing this?” is an interesting question. My guess is they simply have so many PhDs that this makes sense as a low-resource pet project.
BTW thanks for removing the homebrew captcha. It was cute but also annoying.