Musings of an Academic Librarian

Usually when I am showing a student how to cite something in APA 6th I look the article up in Summon (our discovery layer) and use the RefWorks tool to format it to APA.  I then of course tell them to check the reference for errors.  Today I was on Twitter and someone was suggesting using Google Scholar to cite sources instead.  How does GS compare to Summon as a citation tool I wondered? I used the article Obesity epidemic hits New Zealand as an example.  GS cites it like this:  Kent, H. (2003). Obesity epidemic hits New Zealand. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 169(7), 702-702.   Summon cites it like this:   Heather Kent. (2003). Obesity epidemic hits new zealand. Canadian Medical Association. Journal, 169(7), 702-702.  Both citations have left out the DOI but the GS citation has less errors in it. I tried another example: The neurobiology of attachment.  GS cites it like this: Insel, T. R., & Young, L. J. (2001). The neurob...

Anyone who is familiar with Google Scholar (GS) will know that it often provides higher citation counts of articles than Scopus (or other citation databases such as Web of Science).  There are many reasons for this, such as including citations that may not be considered scholarly such as PPT presentations, grey literature not indexed by Scopus and because of indexing errors by GS that lead to duplicate citations. I did a little experiment to see how big a disparity it can be.  I used this article as an example: Internet search tactics by Smith, A. G., one of my old lecturers for the MLIS.  GS said that it was cited by 7 while Scopus said it was cited by just 1 author.  I looked at the extra 6 citations in GS.  They included a university thesis, a research article, a dissertation and 3 things in a foreign language: a research article, a citation for something and a link to a Google book.  So why hadn't Scopus included these citations?  Clearly it does...

I used Delicious a few years ago when I was doing my library masters.  Me and my classmates used it to bookmark resources we found for a wiki we were going to create together as part of an assignment.  It was all the rage at the time and worked well for our needs. And then suddenly around 2010 no one seemed to be using it anymore.  Social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Tumblr, StumbleUpon and Digg fell out of favour.  People started flocking to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter which allowed for more social interaction.  Instead of tagging, using Facebook's "Like" button became a popular way to bookmark content. I decided to revisit Delicious.  The website is still there but it looks woeful.  The homepage is covered in ads and click bait.  Why is it still even there?  It's kind of sad seeing a once good service go into terminal decline.  It's now ranked a dismal 1,235 on the Alexa Rank.  (In contrast Pinterest...

I was discussing Google Glass with a bunch of librarians recently and we got talking about how much Google has changed over the years.  It made me have a look at Google's homepage to see what exactly has changed.  There are less products in the homepage navigation bar and drop down menu than there used to be.  I guess Google is trying to streamline things and get rid of services that aren't popular. Google Labs has gone - an interesting feature where you could see new products they were testing.  So has Google Buzz, a social networking tool designed to compete with Facebook which never took off.  Google Dashboard disappeared a few years ago.  This was a personalized home page that you could customize with various widgets for Facebook, Gmail, eBay, news feeds, etc.  I quite enjoyed playing around with it but I suppose mobile apps replaced the need for it.  Google Reader (for RSS feeds) has been discontinued.  RSS readers have been overtaken ...