Étiquette : Google Scholar

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Open access to scientific knowledge and feudalism knowledge: Is there a connection?

The role of universities and transnational corporations in the circulation of scientific knowledge is considered. If institutions generate, mostly scientific knowledge, trying to facilitate its free circulation, then transnational companies, contrarily, try to remove most significant and cutting-edge scientific knowledge from free circulation and its commercialization and reintroduction into an open, but now commercial, circulation in the TRIPS.

However, paradoxical, the open access movement to scientific knowledge, eventually, facilitates feudalism of knowledge. We call this phenomenon the ‘open access – paradox’. Based on the experiments done with Google Scholar and Google Patents, it is shown that universities generates, mostly scientific knowledge (scientific articles), and transnational companies generates, mostly technological knowledge (patents).

URL : http://www.webology.org/2011/v8n1/a83.html

Publié le

Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar’s Resilience Against it

In a previous paper we provided guidelines for scholars on optimizing research articles for academic search engines such as Google Scholar. Feedback in the academic community to these guidelines was diverse.

Some were concerned researchers could use our guidelines to manipulate rankings of scientific articles and promote what we call ‘academic search engine spam’. To find out whether these concerns are justified, we conducted several tests on Google Scholar.

The results show that academic search engine spam is indeed—and with little effort—possible: We increased rankings of academic articles on Google Scholar by manipulating their citation counts; Google Scholar indexed invisible text we added to some articles, making papers appear for keyword searches the articles were not relevant for; Google Scholar indexed some nonsensical articles we randomly created with the paper generator SciGen; and Google Scholar linked to manipulated versions of research papers that contained a Viagra advertisement.

At the end of this paper, we discuss whether academic search engine spam could become a serious threat to Web-based academic search engines.

URL : http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0013.305