Google Scholar: un état de la question

Dans un article du Library Journal, Peter Jacso passe en revue les problèmes que pose toujours l'outil "académique" de Google:

Google Scholar’s Ghost Authors, Lost Authors, and Other Problems

Les premiers § de l'article:

"Geoffrey Nunberg’s essay criticizing Google’s Book Search (GBS), which he subtitled “A Disaster for Scholars,” emphasized that disturbing errors are endemic. He well recognizes that for mainstream “Googling” purposes “we don’t really care about metadata … provided by a library catalog.” In perhaps his most discouraging point, Nunberg notes that the Google team blames libraries and publishers for bad data.

All these rhyme perfectly with my experience working with another of the search giant’s data-crunching products, Google Scholar (GS). With GS, however, I blame mostly the developers. They decided—very unwisely—not to use the good metadata generously offered to them by scholarly publishers and indexing/abstracting services, but instead chose to try and figure them out through ostensibly smart crawler and parser programs.

Thus research faculty and academic/special libraries dealing with GS face their own metadata disaster, one with dire consequences in evaluating the scholarly publishing productivity and impact of researchers, institutions, journals, and even countries. Millions of records have erroneous metadata, as well as inflated publication and citation counts. [...]"

(source: ResourceShelf, 24/09/09)