NYT: Google Plans New Service for Scientists and Scholars
Google's long awaited scholarly research search service started some hours ago, revealing a surprisingly powerful engine that inter-relates academic research papers and texts using a great deal of meta information. Clicking on search results often puts the viewer into an academic reference site - like the National Institute of Health's NCBI database - which can then offer further reference services, such as listing what books have used this particular article as a citation.
A key criteria for academic results listings appears to be the number of times the work has been cited in other works, much like the original PageRank algorithm that powered Google. This measure is a common reference in academia, which counts citations as an indication of legitimacy.
