The other day we talked about Google Scholar, the Google search engine especificallly destined to scientific and academic fields. One of the most interesting things is that not only can we access to texts that match our thematic search, but also to a number of references from other papers and texts published on the Internet. As stated in Lago at Errant, this implies a new component when checking for the relevance of an article. Instead of checking the endless citation index, we have in Google Scholar a free source to stablish the importance of determined articles.

Under the light of this innovation by Google, it’s likely that some things will change substantially, concerning blogs and journals. One of the problems of charging for articles is that its relevance seems seriously limited, since fewer people can access to it. It also becomes good news for those whoy publish their working papers directly on the web, in their blogs or personal sites. It can be a good alternative to start building an academic background without depending exclusively on formal academic channels of publication. Anyways, for now, we only have speculations on the impact of Google Scholar, which time will determine if they’re true or not.

With these changes, the strategy of companies, like Sage, of opening every now and then the complete file of their journals so that more people can read the papers stored can have interesting consequences in the future, since their articles and reviews will be used as references much more often than the competition’s -for instance, Routledge.

More on the subject at the blog of Alex Halavais, Academic-Gamers; Creativity/Machine and Ponderance. By the way, if you have an academic blog, you can complete this survey on academic blogging held by the people of Crooked Timber.

Update: a very interesting article about Google Scholar and the agreements with the editors for permission to search the abstracts (through El Tintero) can be found in Search Engine Watch.