Academic search engine may help the voluntary sector
Finally, nonprofits may be able to disseminate their research and reports to a worldwide audience through the new Google Scholar.
By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of December 8, 2004.
New Google search for scholarly literature
Google has launched Google Scholar, a
specialized search engine restricted to scholarly literature, such as peer reviewed
articles, technical reports, theses and abstracts. It includes results from
subscription-based online journals that are hidden from the public web. For
more information, see Google
Scholar's FAQ.
Google is offering to include posted reports from eligible professional associations.
This is an opportunity for the voluntary sector to disseminate research and
reports without big investments in OAI
compliant archives, as I recommended in
an earlier article. If a website such as www.nonprofitscan.ca
was included in Google Scholar, it could instantly provide a free search function
on its own site at the same time as joining the international scholarly literature.
Post your reports on Google Scholar!
Anyone doing research in the voluntary sector is constantly frustrated by the
difficulty in finding relevant publications. Yet hundreds of reports and studies
are written annually, many of them posted on individual agency web sites. Some
studies are submitted to research journals and thereby disappear from public
view - unless you belong to a university and can get access through the library.
'Grey literature' is the term for scholarly papers that are not published in
a public journal. Most of the research in the sector is in the form of grey
literature, and while some of it is of poor quality, some is excellent.
Google Scholar may provide an inexpensive way to make this literature searchable and accessible. It includes both published and grey literature, and even books that are not online, or journal articles that are only in hard copy. The search is designed to provide the kind of information that researchers look for, such as the number of times other researchers have cited the article.
In the case of many published journal articles, Scholar will link to an abstract
and then give you the link to the publisher's site, where you can buy the full
text. Scholar now includes the full catalogs of 29 major academic publishers,
with more to come.
Books or hard copy articles are also listed, as long as they are cited in an online article that is posted on Google Scholar. Scholar will even help you find a library that stocks the book.
In the case of posted grey literature, Scholar will link directly to the text.
So if a nonprofit agency is able to post its reports, searchers will be able
to quickly find it while simultaneously searching for the more conventional
academic papers. The voluntary sector needs to do three things before it can
use Google Scholar. First, we need a few gatekeeper organizations that will
define, approve, and post eligible documents, and convince Google to include
its repositories in its scholarly database. We don't want to see service brochures
or annual reports listed as scholarly literature. The new
organization that is emerging from the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy
and the Coalition of National Voluntary Organizations would be a natural choice
for this role, but there could be many others.
Second, there should be a quality control mechanism to allow users to filter
their searches. In academia, a peer review process is the accepted way that
readers can be sure a report was evaluated for quality and relevance. The voluntary
sector should develop a similar process, possibly its own peer review, to increase
the legitimacy of the best material - the documents that are worthy of being
included in the international scholarly literature. Future Google Scholar features
will (I believe) include a way to search only in peer-reviewed articles, and
the sector should prepare for that.
Finally, there should be a stable archive for the posted documents using
DOI or some other persistent identity so that the documents don't vanish
every time an agency redesigns its web site. The simple first step would be
for one major nonprofit research organization like NonprofitsCAN
or the Canadian Council on Social Development
to submit its existing research papers to Google and see what happens.
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Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
