"As many of us recall from our civics lessons in school, the United States is a common law country," says Google Distinguished Engineer Anurag Acharya. "That means when judges issue opinions in legal cases, they often establish precedents that will guide the rulings of other judges in similar cases and jurisdictions. Over time, these legal opinions build, refine and clarify the laws that govern our land. For average citizens, however, it can be difficult to find or even read these landmark opinions. We think that’s a problem: Laws that you don’t know about, you can’t follow — or make effective arguments to change."

You can now search Google Scholar to find opinions by searching specific cases (like Plessy v. Ferguson) or topics (like desegregation). You can type a phrase like "separate but equal" and get results for cases in which such a phrase is in included.

Users can look at cases that are related to others by using the links that say "Cited by" and "Related articles" on the results pages. This is useful for following citations within the opinions themselves.

Google thinks being able to search these opinions will "empower the average citizen" by helping them learn more about the laws that govern them. It does appear to be a great way to educate yourself on legal issues without having to go to law school. Furthermore, it could be of tremendous benefit to students who are actually in law school.

"As we worked to build this feature, we were struck by how readable and accessible these opinions are," says Acharya. "Court opinions don’t just describe a decision but also present the reasons that support the decision. In doing so, they explain the intricacies of law in the context of real-life situations. And they often do it in language that is surprisingly straightforward, even for those of us outside the legal profession. In many cases, judges have gone quite a bit out of their way to make complex legal issues easy to follow."

Google really is working non-stop on "organizing the world’s information". This particular instance may only apply to the U.S. (and such a feature could get awfully tricky on a global scale), but it would not be surprising to see more countries’ data get included in the future.

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“Test” might not be the right word, though.  Think “crucible” – Christianson’s paper is over 5,000 words long, and contains tables, graphs, and all the percentages you could wish for; she really wanted to know if Google provided access to everything a researcher needs.  On to the conclusion, then, in which “GS” stands for “Google Scholar.”

“Depending on one’s definition of a complete citation, GS indexed between fifty-seven and seventy-seven percent of the articles from the sample core list of journals,” Christianson writes.  “If GS is held to the standard, of, say, the Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, about half the articles from the sample were found.”

At this point, things are looking bad for ol’ Google, but then they get better – or worse, depending on what you expected going into this examination.  “This can be interpreted as an automation tour de force for a new database or as a shocking failure to include basic material,” Christianson continues.

Well, at least the folks running things in Mountain View didn’t claim Google Scholar was perfect.  In truth, they’re actually much more humble in their description than is usual, and the team concludes, “We recognize the debt we owe to all those in academia whose work has made Google itself a reality and we hope to make Google Scholar as useful to this community as possible.”

Fair enough.  As for those companies that (falsely) claim to be leaders and pioneers, it’s probably not worth the effort to address ‘em.

Hat tip to Peter Suber.

Peter Brantley at O’Reilly Radar noted how annual price increases have rankled ScienceDirect customers, and how Elsevier kept its distance from services like Google Scholar:

Elsevier has long supported its own search interface for scholarly literature, Scopus, and it was no surprise to many that they avoided inclusion. However, they doubtless lost eyeballs as more and more of this traffic migrated to the freely available Scholar product.

As people opted to use Google’s service, Elsevier would have lost opportunities to sell its articles, as they were not available to Google searchers. Brantley cited how Elsevier has apparently reached a conclusion that other content companies may be missing:

This is notable for a wide range of reasons. One of the most prominent is that Elsevier clearly feels comfortable with having its core intellectual property crawled and analyzed by Google to augment discovery.

In contrast to the various European newspaper publisher-related lawsuits, Elsevier has clearly felt that even with the basic, essential tools available today – robot exclusions, sitemaps, and business agreements – their ability to execute business strategy is unimpeded by encouraging greater content exposure.

Rather than fight a userbase that has increasingly opted to use Google’s services to find content, Elsevier will embrace it instead. It seems like a sensible solution, one that too few companies have adopted instead of hurling lawsuits at the search company.

Anurag says, “We try to rank [Google Scholar] search results as a researcher in the area would. We take into account many factors, including who wrote the article, where it was published, how relevant the article is to the query, and what other articles have said about it.”

Google also introduces a couple of other engineers working on Scholar; Alex Verstak, Robert Tansley, and Christian DiCarlo.

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Typically, Scholar only sorts by citation rank, and this will make it easier to find current papers. You can see it in action here.

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Yes, Earthlink says “a geek gets it done and a nerd doesn’t,” but keep in mind who said it. Nerds get plenty done, we just can’t express it in zeroes and ones.

For example, given a day or two with Google Scholar’s new feature that allows researchers to keep up with the latest research (look to the top right to find the link to “Recent articles”), I can tell you the latest findings on the type of alchemy used by the Oracle of Delphi, or the works of Flavius Josephus.

Or even, if I’m lucky, the latest discussions of Borges’ intriguing character Droctulftcurrently there are only four discussions of our loveable barbarian, so surely someone in the future will bring him up?

Google software engineer Dejan Perkovic explains the new feature:

It’s not just a plain sort by date, but rather we try to rank recent papers the way researchers do, by looking at the prominence of the author’s and journal’s previous papers, how many citations it already has, when it was written, and so on

Scholarly endeavors are about learning what has already been done and building on it. We hope this feature will help researchers worldwide learn from and build on the latest advances.

That includes the latest advances in the new religion of science, quantum physics, an area where nerds and geeks can coexist so as there is someone to explain to the geek what has just happened in his experiment that turned out screwy. Schroedenger’s cat, anyone?

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