Google recently launched Google Scholar, a search engine for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports. By special arrangement, Google’s spiders index content from open and password-protected sites. However, unless users have a subscription to protected sites, they can’t read those articles.

When I need to analyze consumer trends, predict market growth, or compute market share, I usually turn to journal databases and journals, not just the Internet. My access to databases usually includes access to journal articles, so I’m ahead of Google Scholar users. Still, Google Scholar is in beta, so the company may simply be testing the technology before working out deals with journals, universities, libraries, and research organizations.

(c) 2004 by Andrea Coutu. Vancouver Marketing Consultant. All rights reserved.