Thursday, April 20, 2006

Keeping up with recent research



As a graduate student at the University of Maryland years ago, I took an interesting course on quantum computing. The topic intrigued me and, from time to time, I like to go back and and see what is new in the area (for all I know, Google may some day need quantum computers to extend search into the intergalactic domain :-) ).

Today we're launching a feature of Google Scholar which will make it easier for researchers to keep up with recent research. From quantum computing to copper binding in prion protein. It's not just a plain sort by date, but rather we try to rank recent papers the way researchers do, by looking at the prominence of the author's and journal's previous papers, how many citations it already has, when it was written, and so on. Look for the new link on the upper right for "Recent articles" -- or switch to "All articles" for the full list.

Scholarly endeavors are about learning what has already been done and building on it. We hope this feature will help researchers worldwide learn from and build on the latest advances.

Update: Clarified new feature by adding new sentence to end of second paragraph.

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