Very often users are not happy with just seeing the reference -- they want to get further information, the fulltext et cetera. At the same time, hyperlinks, DOIs or other identifiers that could easily be used to get to this content are missing from the references, and adding them manually can be very difficult for large databases.

A nice solution would be to add a link called "search Google Scholar". This link is based on the key information of a reference:
* Title
* First author
* (maybe) the journal
* (maybe) the publication year

For example: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=The+extended+mind.+&btnG=Search+S...

In most cases, the first result in Google Scholar leads to the full text of the reference.

This feature can add a lot of value to a reference database -- with relatively simple means.

Let me know if I can help. My Drupal coding skills are probably not good enough to contribute to the code directly, but I can give feedback and test which Google Scholar queries are accurate. This feature would really help me a lot in a current project of mine.

Cheers,
Matthias Samwald

Comments

rjerome’s picture

rjerome commented

Interesting idea, and it shouldn't be a big deal to implement. Where did you get the format for the google scholar query string? (?as_q=... &btnG=...) etc?

Ron.

matthiassamwald’s picture

matthiassamwald commented

Hi Ron,

Have a look at the 'advanced search' form of Google Scholar:
http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search?hl=en&lr=

You can fill in values you want and then see what URL comes out of it. For title, you do not specify a field.

For example, if I enter the placeholders
__title__
__author__
__journal__

into the respective fields, the following URL is generated:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=__title__&num=10&btnG=Search+Scho...

You can take this URL and subsitute the placeholders with data from a biblio node. This should do the trick for most references, I think.

Cheers,
Matthias

rjerome’s picture

rjerome commented

Hi Matthias,

I actually hacked something up last night and it works pretty well, now the issue is the growing list of links (export, file attachments, google scholar) being attached to each entry is starting to get a bit ugly. I'm thinking of some way to hide these (like a collapsed fieldset) using javascript and then if the user wants them, they will just click a single link which will drop down a number of actions for that particular node. What's your opinion?

Ron.

matthiassamwald’s picture

matthiassamwald commented

Amazing!
Regarding layout, the best solution would be to leave this up to the customization of the administrator (but I guess that invites a lot of complexities). I would fear that visitors that are not too familiar with the functionality will ignore a collapsed fieldset, and will not even find out that they have the opportunity to surf Google Scholar -- so I think that it should not be hidden.

rjerome’s picture

rjerome commented

I just moved this over to the 6--1 branch, so you can try it out next time (within the next 12 hours) the -dev version gets built.

Ron.

kremena’s picture

kremena commented

Great feature indeed. Looking forward to test it, guys. Subscribing.

danepowell’s picture

danepowell commented

Awesome feature! Thanks. One comment, it looks like the link was copied from the EndNote export link, and it still has the same title - so if you hover over the Google Scholar link, you get a tooltip that says "Click to download the endnote tagged...." (I can spin this into a separate bug report if that's more appropriate)

rjerome’s picture

rjerome commented
Status: Active » Fixed

Opps, I'll fix that.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.

shimonhaber’s picture

shimonhaber commented
Issue summary: View changes

Hi all, Shimon Haber here. Should I link my Google Scholar with title like this: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0Zq74wQAAAAJ Shimon Haber - Professor Emeritus