Ok I am going to talk a little bit about what has been flying through every email list I am subscribed to. Heck my husband (who isn't in library or scholarly circles) has gotten a ton of email about this too.

There are tons of new articles about Google Scholar, one can go do a Yahoo news search or a Google news search to find any number of articles on this to learn more and form your own opinion.

Thursday, while I was out of the office (because I got the day off for the lovely pleasure to work Saturday) Google officially launched a new search service aimed at scientists and academic researchers. Google Scholar is a free beta service that allows users to search for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports.

Google Scholar accesses information from resources such as academic publishers, universities, professional societies and preprint repositories. Supposedly users can find references to older works that may only exist offline in books or other publications because the company says it automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results.
There are currently no online advertisements accompanying the search results.
Topics covered include medicine, physics, economics and computer science. Documents in the Google Scholar search index are written in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Ok every librarian's head is popping off and spontaneously combusting. I am quite worried about this. Despite our best efforts and multiple classes, our medical students use Google to search for medical literature more than they use Medline. I had a conversation with a friend in biomedical research this weekend and she mentioned that she too knew other researchers who just didn't "bother" with Medline and used Google. Google Scholar mentions nothing about indexing terms and how it deals with smilies, plurals, and different approved spellings. I am guessing that it really doesn't deal with them, but that is just a guess. So your very complicated Medline searches are going to be even more difficult and yield potentially too much junky information or just too much somewhat decent information for you to sift through and find the really good meaty stuff. I absolutely cringe at the whole thing it makes me want to throw up at the possible life and death problems that this could cause in medical research.

While I think Google Scholar is a very ugly alternative to online subject databases such Medline, Biosis, etc. However, I think Google Scholar could be helpful if used correctly in the right way. How many times has a patron given you a citation (if you call cryptic scribbles a citation) to some vague meeting in Oslo, Norway from 3 years ago about latest treatments in whatever disease? Not often? Often? My point is that used correctly Google Scholar might be a good starting point to find those odd cryptic citations, papers, presentation, thesis, etc. that are lurking out there. Once found will it be full text....uh well probably not, and most definitely not for free...but that is a topic for another time. But at least it gives you confirmation to that odd bit of chicken scratch and gives you a starting point to actually obtain the ubiquitous document.

I am scared of Google Scholar and its implications for subject searching on the scholarly world. The very people it is intended to help deserve and require more sophisticated databases than Google Scholar and those databases already exist. Scholars should not be plowing the web (be it on Google general or Google Scholar) to try and sift out the wheat from the chaff. They already have problems doing that on traditional scientific databases and Google Scholar will not help them it will only make it worse. It will make it worse in the sense that will lull them into a false sense of completeness. But Google Scholar could be a great tool for document delivery librarians.