Google does MEDLINE!
This is profoundly cool—at least for science and medicine geeks. Google’s new Google Scholar provides a journal search feature that provides some additional useful information such as citation counts. Right now, the interface could be improved by addition of the ability to sort by date instead of always by “relevancy,” but this tool looks very promising. On the info page, it also states that GS will be including theses and books in their database, which might be very interesting. I’ve always said that (at least in the biological sciences; I know it’s different in other fields such as engineering) NOBODY ever reads anyone’s thesis, mainly because there’s already too much information out there in journals, but also because it’s not terribly easy to search for relevant work in theses. If Google starts including theses in its results, it might change that a little bit.
Yeah, I discovered that a couple days ago and have already used it a bit. If nothing else, it’s good for abstracts, but I can also download some pdfs by using my school password on some sites. The nice thing is that it’s a universal hub, whereas typically you’d have to go through all those quirky search parameters of the different online databases.