Damn clever: Google scholar

Scholar.google.com: Damn clever. Scholars are increasingly prone to googling subjects before going to library catalogs, World-CAT, or the MLA Bibliography. Google is just faster, simpler, and more up-to-date than slow, CD-ROM based databases that require log-ins and proxy servers. If you can find a book on a topic you're looking for through Google, why go to the library website?

Of course, that short-cut often creates a problem, which is that you get a lot of personal websites when what you really want to know is: who's published something serious on this? As much as I enjoy doing this blog and am pro-blogging in general, sometimes you want books, not blogs. Scholar.google fixes that problem, and cuts out anything that isn't a journal or a book pub.

Also: one neat thing about scholar.google is, it gives you links to the people who cited each entry.

I tried Secularism: see the 3000 hits? That's why my book is taking so long to finish. I'm happy to say I've read most of the books on the first page, though. Interesting how many of the top hits relate to Turkey and India!