[crossposted at Geek Notes]

The big scholar geek news of the day is the unveiling of the beta of Google Scholar, a new service that lets you google the academic universe, with citation rankings and cross references. Like any self-respecting academic, my inaugural use of the site was to do some ego-surfing:

So, it lists a bunch of my works, ranked by citation. You can click on the “Cited by” link and it will obviously give you all the works that cite that work. What I couldn’t figure out how to do is to create a kind of web of inter-related papers, which you can do on some other sites (ISI Web of of Science in particular). Clicking on the title of a work will sometimes take you to the publisher’s webpage for the work (which then might require a fee to actually let you see the work) or to a preprint somewhere. Additional versions are sometimes listed as well.

Further down, there are hits that are not papers of mine, but other papers that mention me in some form, either by citing work of mine or by acknowledging comments or help.

There are some glitches: (i) for some works, the site correctly lists the preprint I have on my website, for others it doesn’t, (ii) as you see in the picture, my dissertation is listed twice (actually, there are some further occurrences further on down). But it’s just a beta after all.

This is certainly a good start. Searching for academically relevant material on the main Google site often gives many false positives, this site is much more targeted (it doesn’t seem to index scholarly blogs, however).

You can also search for topics of interest to you, not just for authors. Since I was asked about evidentiality a couple of times in the last few days, I tried that out. The results look very appropriate:

In all, this is a very cool addition to the research toolbox.