Academic Search Engines. A Quantitative Outlook

221 Pages·2011·8.633 MB·English

by  Jose Luis Ortega

Academic Search Engines
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Academic Search Engines
A quantitative outlook
J ´ L O
OSE UIS RTEGA
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First published in 2014
ISBN 978-1-84334-791-0 (print)
ISBN 978-1-78063-472-2 (online)
Chandos Information Professional Series ISSN: 2052-210X (print) and ISSN: 2052-2118 (online)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014946174
© J.L. Ortega, 2014
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To everyone who was interested in this book – family,
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mi madre y mi padre, quienes se empeñaron en que este
libro saliera a la luz
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Contents
List of figures and tables xi
Preface xvii
About the author xxi
1 Introduction 1
What is an academic search engine? 3
Challenges for an academic search engine 3
The evolution of academic search engines 6
Future perspectives 8
2 CiteSeerx: a scientific engine for scientists 11
Autonomous citation indexing 12
A focus on computer science 13
A searchable digital library 15
Searching for authors and citations 17
Parsing mistakes 20
Other ‘Seers’: the CiteSeerx lab 24
A pioneer in citation indexing 27
3 Scirus: a multi-source searcher 29
Web pages and authoritative sources 30
Crawling and data extraction 39
Source filtering 41
Ranking on links 43
A missed opportunity 44
vii
Academic Search Engines
4 AMiner: science networking as an information source 47
A networked engine 48
A chaotic design 49
Based on bibliographic databases 57
Searching only in documents 58
Exhaustive author profiles 61
PatentMiner 67
A half-academic search engine 68
5 Microsoft Academic Search: the multi-object engine 71
The object-level vertical search engine 73
Slow content updating speed 74
Filtering across the directory 79
A multidimensional ranking 81
A composition based on profiles 82
Visualization: graphs as research assessment tools 103
More a directory than an engine 106
6 Google Scholar: on the shoulders of a giant 109
A specialization of Google 110
Feeding back its own sources 111
The opacity of results 119
Google Scholar’s additional services 124
The most exhaustive academic search engine 138
7 Other academic search engines 143
BASE 144
Q-Sensei Scholar 148
WorldWideScience 152
viii
Contents
8 A comparative analysis 159
Functioning 159
Structure 162
Coverage 163
Searching 175
A heterogeneous sample 178
9 Final remarks 179
References 183
Index 193
ix