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Last active December 14, 2015 08:48
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Experimental Find It Feature: "if no electronic version is found, offer to search for it in google scholar"
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"if no electronic version is found, offer to search for it in google scholar"

Why?

  • Find It sometimes provides no full text for a citation, when the paper cited is actually available on the public web for everyone, as PDF or HTML.
    • Because we don't have a licensed copy, but it's on the web for free
    • Or, because we do have a licensed copy, but SFX failed to find it (possibly because insufficient metadata was included in citation), and it's on the web for free too.

Google Scholar is pretty good at finding free copies of scholarly papers online. So when Find It fails to find, the expert user often goes to Google Scholar to check and see if there's a free copy -- but that requires manually going to google scholar, copy and pasting article title, etc. As well as knowing about Google Scholar.

So Umlaut can save the time of the reader.

Challenges/Limitations

Google Scholar has no API, all we can do is 'blind link' to it.

So it's quite possible that Google Scholar won't have a free full text link, we can't know that in advance.

  • The article might not come up at all in the Google Scholar search results
  • The article might come up, but without a free fulltext link.

Even when Google does know about a free full text link, the Google UI is confusing, with many things that could confuse the user

  • If the user clicks on the title of the link, they're usually going to go to the publisher's website, where they may or may not actually get access (if off-campus, almost definitely not).
  • If the user clicks on the Find It link, they're back to Find It where they started, in a potentially infinite loop.
  • User has to recognize what a full-text link provided by Google Scholar looks like, click on that if there, and ignore the others.

'See also' link

I think it's actually pretty likely most users are not going to recognize that, and are going to get confused, but this is still very useful to users in the know -- to begin with, it seems like we should include this feature subtly in the 'see also' links, not under the 'online access' section.

Examples

showing success:

Even in success scenario, user has to identify the full text link, not the other links that wont' get them there.

example showing how things can fail.

Here, Google Scholar does find the article, but it has no fulltext link. If the user clicks on the title, the publisher offers to sell it to them. If the user clicks on the Find It link, they just go back to where they started. Kind of frustrating.

thanks to Sharon and Christina for helping with example links

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