Google made a very interesting announcement last week about a stunning new feature for their Google Scholar product. Google Scholar Citations provides a platform for authors to create their own identity and manage their citations - with the ability to link to co-authors and create clearly laid-out graphics of citation impact by various indices for individual articles or for the corpus of someone's career.
I was lucky to get to write about this for Information Today's Newsbreaks, which gave me the chance to talk with a lot of very interesting people and get their ideas and initial reactions to the system. As I noted in the article, with Google Scholar, we now have joined the "motherlode of scholarly citation data, across the entire range of disciplines, available for author profiling and more sophisticated analysis and relevance linking." This is a game-changer and, along with Microsoft's entry into the area, leaves Elsevier's Scopus and Thomsen Reuters' Web of Science having to play some serious catch-up.
One of my concerns in writing this was the status and intention of Google in creating this - how this links to the professed realignment towards protecting shareholder interests and company value that Larry Page spoke about at the same time this product was released.
I don't think I'm jaded, but as someone who attended computer trade shows nearly 30 years ago when the PC was launched, I'm feeling some degree of deja vu. Back then everyone wanted to avoid any support for the big bad "Big Blue," IBM, that controlled the computer industry (pre-PC); preferring instead to support the operating system and products of a young company composed of computer geeks based in Redmond, WA. Within a decade, the tables had turned on those assumptions as Microsoft grew to be an immense power with many of the same traits developers abhorred in IBM.
Can we assume that Google will continue its benign product development and 'do no evil' mantra? Will Microsoft's product give them some competition? With Scopus and WoS be able to forge a path to remain viable? Time will tell. Your thoughts?
This is a great innovation and the I agree that the implications are great. I realize we rely a lot of Google, but I have to hope this end of their business will remain free and so easy to use.
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ReplyDeleteIt seems obvious to me that the European Union must closer such cooperation, but it does not have to mean creating a supranational police. First of all the EU must do everything it can to increase effectiveness of cooperation (for example data exchange) in frames of present legal regulations on EUROPOL.
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