The beta of Google Scholar is now available. This new area of Google activity describes itself thus “Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.” It's obviously still a beta and needs populating. The frequently asked questions in About Google Scholar seem to admit is isn't covering the complete field of academic discourse. Also, non traditional sources such as webblogs aren't getting a look in … but of course they aren't peer reviewed are they? 🙂
Still if Google Scholar picks up pace then there's probably cause for other commercial companies in the same space to be very concerned.
