Why google scholar should maintain my publication list!

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Google scholar is a search engine for scientific publications. I wonder if it would make sense for google scholar to provide academics functionality which allows them to easily maintain their publication lists. Consider, just as an example, my list. I try and keep the publication details up-to-date, where possible and allowed I'll also add PDF files of (and/or links to) the actual paper.

As some of you may know, publications, and in particular citations of one's publications, have become the currency of the scientific community (whether that is good or bad is another discussion ... another blog entry to follow). This means that authors have a strong interest in keeping their publication record available and ensuring the publication data (meta-data) is correct and complete. Usually using some mechanism such as BiBTeX. See here for an example.

So why would google scholar want maintain this data for me? Well, I'm not proposing they do all the work for me, but, if you look at google scholar than they already have a lot of publication data concerning the publications of academics. At the same time, however, several faults are present in their data. It is in my interest, the interest of searchers, and therefore also in google's interest that this data is correct. So, if google were to provide functionality that would allow me to easily bring together all my publications that can be found in google scholar (also taking into consideration the many variations of my name: H.A. Proper, H.A. (Erik) Proper, H. Proper, Erik Proper and E. Proper), and link them up with the correct publication information I already maintain on my own publication page, then I would be willing to invest the time of getting this list correct. This would be a win-win-win (searchers, google and me).

Comments

  1. Anonymous16/1/08 11:52

    Have you given up on PMS so soon?

    We had Google Scholar beat hands down!

    :-)

    ReplyDelete

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