You Enjoy Google Scholar? You Gonna Love SmealSearch!

There has been a lot of hype around Google Scholar. This is indeed a useful tool for students and researchers. To put it in a nutshell, here is what Google has to say about it:

" 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."

To give my personal example, I was able to track papers of mine for which, sadly enough, I did not have copies left over.

Now here is some great news: SmealSearch, a service from the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University. From what I have seen playing with it, it is  even better than Google Scholar. Here is what people involved in the SmealSearch Project have to say about it:

" SMEALSearch is a niche search engine that searches the web and catalogs academic articles as well as commercially produced articles and reports that address any branch of Business. The search engine crawls websites of universities, commercial organizations, research institutes and government departments to retrieve academic articles, working papers, white papers, consulting reports, magazine articles, and published statistics and facts. For certain documents, the database only stores the hyperlinks to those documents. SMEALSearch performs a citation analysis of all the academic articles accessed and lists them in order of their citation rates in academic papers (the most cited articles are listed first). Articles available through the SMEALSearch engine can be downloaded (for fair use) without any charges. However, some articles may have only the abstracts listed, and may have to be purchased directly from the appropriate sources."

Congratulations! This is a great tool. You can locate the papers, identify related articles, citations. You can rate the papers, post comments etc... You can even search for business schools. Lucky PhD students! It was a lot more difficult in my days (yes, there were less papers too!).

PS: I am sure Jim Mahar gonna be very proud of his alma mater!