Google Scholar Review

There are several ways of searching the medical literature. Previously I used PubMed, the interface from the National Library of Medicine. I've recently switched to Google Scholar, which has these advantages:

• Papers are listed not in order of publication, but in order of relevance, which is determined by PageRank, the same system used in regular Google searches.
• Next to each publication is a link to other publications that cite it. This allows you to immediately determine whether a paper is influential and who it has influenced.
• Scholar also includes searches of publications that don't make it to Medline, like books, small journals, and private collections.
• Scholar uses the familiar uncluttered Google interface.

I tested Scholar by running searches of topics that I'm familiar with, like collapsing glomerulopathy, and it reliably listed the most relevant papers in the field first.

Addendum: A library professional tears Google Scholar a new one over here.

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