Release of Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a free search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across many disciplines and formats, including articles, theses, books and court opinions. It was created by Google engineers Anurag Acharya and Alex Verstak and launched in beta form. It ranks results taking into account the full text of each document, where it was published, who wrote it and how often it has been cited. Features such as the cited by link, citation counts and author profiles have made it a widely used tool for researchers, although critics point out that its coverage is not documented and that it can include low-quality sources. It has become one of the main ways in which people find academic papers.

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