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From Physorg.com:
José van Dijck of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands argues that search engines in general, and Google Scholar in particular, have become significant co-producers of academic knowledge, rather than neutral tools. Google Scholar is a service claims to search diverse sources from one convenient place, to find information in a range of formats (articles, theses, books, abstracts or court opinions) and help to locate these through a library or online.
To date, little empirical or ethnographic research is available on how students actually go about open searches. But surveys do prove that students performing topic searches for scholarly papers overwhelmingly choose search engines, rather than library-based research discovery networks, as their preferred starting-point. Many students view library services as an ‘add-on’ to Google Scholar, rather than the other way around.
One of the key points about search engines’ ranking and profiling systems, according to van Dijck, is that these are not open to the same rules as traditional library scholarship methods in the public domain. “Automated search systems developed by commercial Internet giants like Google tap into public values scaffolding the library system and yet, when looking beneath this surface, core values such as transparency and openness are hard to find,” she explains.
From David Dahlquist, in Macworld
By Jenna Zwang, in eSchool News
Catherine Wangeci K-Thuo will be joining the