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The purpose of this paper is to report on a quantitative study of massive digital library (MDL) Google Books' coverage of Hawaiian and Pacific books.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to report on a quantitative study of massive digital library (MDL) Google Books' coverage of Hawaiian and Pacific books.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 1,500 books were randomly selected from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa's Hawaiian, Pacific, and general stacks collections. Their level of access was then determined in Google Books by observing whether the books had a metadata record, were full‐text searchable, and whether they were available as in snippet, preview, or full‐text views.
Findings
Results show that Google Books has a sizable number of metadata records for Hawaiian and Pacific books, but has only a limited number available for full‐text searching. In contrast, a larger number of books from the general stacks were available for full‐text searching.
Research limitations/implications
Because of the small sample size, margins of error remain quite large. The field would benefit from a larger size of collection sample.
Practical implications
Diversity in librarianship is a major concern for libraries both within the USA, as in the case of historically underrepresented groups as well as in non‐English‐speaking countries.
Social implications
Diversity in librarianship also concerns the central mission of libraries to provide the basic human right of access to information. Digital libraries must be held to the same standards.
Originality/value
Massive digital libraries such as Google Books need to be more carefully examined; this study contributes to this need.
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Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to compare Google Books with WorldCat and to assess some other functionalities of Google Books.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to compare Google Books with WorldCat and to assess some other functionalities of Google Books.
Design/methodology/approach
Over 500 random samples generated from WorldCat were searched on Google Books. The search results were used to compare the coverage between Google Books and WorldCat, to estimate the successful link rate to a local library catalogue, the percentage available as full view, snippet, and preview on Google Books, and other services of Google Books.
Findings
Google Books can retrieve almost all the books catalogued in WorldCat. Its “Find in a library” link to a local library catalogue works 75 percent of the time. Fewer than 10 percent of Google Books items have free full views, and about 15 percent have snippets and previews, respectively. Previews are much more useful than snippets. Google Books probably indexes books that it does not possess in digital form, in addition to indexing all the books that it has acquired in digital form.
Originality/value
No previous empirical studies of this kind have been found. This study assesses Google Books' coverage and services with quantitative measures.
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Daniel Torres-Salinas, Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, Juan Miguel Campanario and Emilio Delgado López-Cózar
– The aim of this study is to analyse the disciplinary coverage of Thomson Reuters' Book Citation Index database focusing on publisher presence, impact and specialisation.
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this study is to analyse the disciplinary coverage of Thomson Reuters' Book Citation Index database focusing on publisher presence, impact and specialisation.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted a descriptive study in which they examined coverage by discipline, publisher distribution by field and country of publication, and publisher impact. For this purpose the Thomson Reuters' subject categories were aggregated into 15 disciplines.
Findings
Humanities and social sciences comprise 30 per cent of the total share of this database. Most of the disciplines are covered by very few publishers mainly from the UK and USA (75.05 per cent of the books), in fact 33 publishers hold 90 per cent of the whole share. Regarding publisher impact, 80.5 per cent of the books and chapters remained uncited. Two serious errors were found in this database: the Book Citation Index does not retrieve all citations for books and chapters; and book citations do not include citations to their chapters.
Originality/value
There are currently no studies analysing in depth the coverage of this novel database which covers monographs.
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Keywords
Abstract
Details
Keywords
Amalia Mas-Bleda and Mike Thelwall
The purpose of this paper is to assess the educational value of prestigious and productive Spanish scholarly publishers based on mentions of their books in online scholarly…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to assess the educational value of prestigious and productive Spanish scholarly publishers based on mentions of their books in online scholarly syllabi.
Design/methodology/approach
Syllabus mentions of 15,117 books from 27 publishers were searched for, manually checked and compared with Microsoft Academic (MA) citations.
Findings
Most books published by Ariel, Síntesis, Tecnos and Cátedra have been mentioned in at least one online syllabus, indicating that their books have consistently high educational value. In contrast, few books published by the most productive publishers were mentioned in online syllabi. Prestigious publishers have both the highest educational impact based on syllabus mentions and the highest research impact based on MA citations.
Research limitations/implications
The results might be different for other publishers. The online syllabus mentions found may be a small fraction of the syllabus mentions of the sampled books.
Practical implications
Authors of Spanish-language social sciences and humanities books should consider general prestige when selecting a publisher if they want educational uptake for their work.
Originality/value
This is the first study assessing book publishers based on syllabus mentions.
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Philipp Mayr and Anne‐Kathrin Walter
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the new scientific search service Google Scholar (GS). It aims to discuss this search engine, which is intended exclusively for searching…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the new scientific search service Google Scholar (GS). It aims to discuss this search engine, which is intended exclusively for searching scholarly documents, and then empirically test its most important functionality. The focus is on an exploratory study which investigates the coverage of scientific serials in GS.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is based on queries against different journal lists: international scientific journals from Thomson Scientific (SCI, SSCI, AH), open access journals from the DOAJ list and journals from the German social sciences literature database SOLIS as well as the analysis of result data from GS. All data gathering took place in August 2006.
Findings
The study shows deficiencies in the coverage and up‐to‐dateness of the GS index. Furthermore, the study points out which web servers are the most important data providers for this search service and which information sources are highly represented. The paper can show that there is a relatively large gap in Google Scholar's coverage of German literature as well as weaknesses in the accessibility of Open Access content. Major commercial academic publishers are currently the main data providers.
Research limitations/implications
Five different journal lists were analysed, including approximately 9,500 single titles. The lists are from different fields and of various sizes. This limits comparability. There were also some problems matching the journal titles of the original lists to the journal title data provided by Google Scholar. The study was only able to analyse the top 100 Google Scholar hits per journal.
Practical implications
The paper concludes that Google Scholar has some interesting pros (such as citation analysis and free materials) but the service cannot be seen as a substitute for the use of special abstracting and indexing databases and library catalogues due to various weaknesses (such as transparency, coverage and up‐to‐dateness).
Originality/value
The authors do not know of any other study using such a brute force approach and such a large empirical basis. The study can be considered as using brute force in the sense that it gathered lots of data from Google and then analysed the data in a macroscopic way.
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Ming-der Wu and Shih-chuan Chen
The purpose of this study is to examine how graduate students perceive and use Google Scholar. Google Scholar has provided a convenient alternative for finding scholarly documents…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine how graduate students perceive and use Google Scholar. Google Scholar has provided a convenient alternative for finding scholarly documents since its inception in 2004 and has become a favoured tool for numerous academics. Knowledge of patrons’ usage patterns and attitudes towards Google Scholar will assist librarians in designing appropriate instruction programmes to improve students’ research abilities.
Design/methodology/approach
In this study, 32 graduate students from the National Taiwan University were interviewed whose fields of study are the humanities (10), social sciences (11) and science and technology (11).
Findings
Students prefer the usability of Google Scholar over library databases. However, they appreciate the quality of documents retrieved from library databases and regard these databases as crucial tools for finding scholarly documents. Science and technology students favoured Google Scholar more than those who study the humanities and social sciences.
Research limitations/implications
This study only examines the perceptions and behaviour of graduate students. Future studies should include undergraduate students to investigate their use of Google Scholar, thereby obtaining a comprehensive understanding of various patrons of university libraries.
Practical implications
This study shows that graduate students appreciate and use Google Scholar to find scholarly documents, although some students experience difficulties. The findings of this study may assist university libraries in improving their instruction programmes.
Originality/value
The majority of previous studies have focused on coverage, quality and retrieval performance of Google Scholar. However, this study evaluates Google Scholar from a user’s perspective.
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Lanfeng Kao, Anlin Chen and Chih-Hsiang Chen
This chapter investigates attention theory by examining retail investors' true intention to purchase. Attention theory indicates that investors, and especially retail investors…
Abstract
This chapter investigates attention theory by examining retail investors' true intention to purchase. Attention theory indicates that investors, and especially retail investors, typically invest in stocks about which they are aware. Previous studies test attention theory by analyzing stock price behavior or trading volume. However, stock prices and trading volume are primarily driven by institutional investors rather than retail investors. We examine investor attention using initial public offering (IPO) subscriptions in Taiwan because only retail investors are allowed to subscribe to Taiwanese IPOs. We use media coverage as a measure of passive retail investor attention and Google search volume as a measure of active retail investor attention. Our results reveal that active attention has a more profound relationship with retail investor IPO subscriptions than passive attention does. Additionally, information about the value of IPOs taken from trading prices in the pre-IPO market mitigates the effects of attention theory.
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The purpose of this paper is to revisit Google Scholar.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to revisit Google Scholar.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Google Scholar.
Findings
The Google Books project has given a massive and valuable boost to the already rich and diverse content of Google Scholar. The downside of the growth is that significant gaps remain for top ranking journals and serials, and the number of duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate records for the same source documents (which Google Scholar cannot detect reliably) has increased.
Originality/value
This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Google Scholar.
Details