Tag: API

The future of Google Scholar

There is an interesting interview out in Nature where Richard van Noorden interviewed Anurag Acharya from Google Scholar: Google Scholar pioneer on search engine’s future : Nature News & Comment.  Definitley worth a look.  It has tidbits on the past, present and future of Google Scholar.

There are also some follow ups to this.  For example on Twitter I saw the following exchange:

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I am in general agreement here that the cmmnity needs to start thinking about an open alternative.  Yes, I like Google Scholar (e.g., see my post on the Google Scholar blog: Using Google Scholar in Scholarly Workflows that I wrote in honor of the 10th Anniversary og GS.  But the lack of an API interface and the givng in to publishers demands seems lame.  So I do think we need to start to build up new strategies.  //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

A good day for the Public Library of Science and science in general: #PLoS opens up search API

Well, thanks to @yokofakun (Pierre Lindenbaum) and #gepasi (Pedro Mendes) on twitter I found out about the announcement from the Public Library of Science (PLoS) yesterday that they have opened up a search application programming interface (API) to allow outside users better access to PLoS searching (see the PLoS blog: PLoS API). This is a great step for PLoS and should accelerate the ways that people access and search for content at PLoS. For more information see:

To use it you need to register for an PLoS API Key (I just got one, not that I will use it, but was just checking …). 
Looking forward to seeing what people do with this.
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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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