WIKIMEDIA, HARTL69Google Scholar is doing just fine, thank you very much. In a recent Science news story, Anurag Acharya, who heads development for Google Scholar, said that the free service is gaining users the world over, especially in China. “Rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated,” said Acharya, who added that the Google Scholar team was actually expanding.
For years, scuttlebutt has swirled that Google could discontinue Scholar, which scours the scientific literature and provides citation statistics for millions of published papers. With commercial competitors, including Thomson Reuters’s Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus, Google Scholar is but one of the ways that academicians can navigate the vast body of scientific literature. In addition, Microsoft’s Academic Search is growing rapidly, which will “keep Thomson Reuters and Elsevier on their toes,” Anne-Wil Harzing, the creator of citation analysis tool Publish or Perish, told Science.
