Email Alerts for Google Scholar

Google Scholar added the option to get email alerts when new articles related to your interests are published. For some reason, this feature is not available in Google Alerts and Google Scholar still doesn't offer feeds for search results.

Google Scholar's email alerts feature is special because Google changes your to get better results (for example, [statistical speech recognition] has been changed to [statistical intitle:"speech recognition"]), Google shows a list of sample results and you can manage the alerts only in Google Scholar.


To try the new feature, go to Google Scholar, search for something you're interested in and click on the ugly email icon placed at the top of the search results pages. Even if it's extremely useful for students and researchers, Google Scholar has a cluttered interface with many options. It's the only Google service that uses a check box on the homepage.


{ Thanks, Bill. }

Google Scholar PageRank

Google Scholar launched a new feature: ranking the recent papers by their importance. The importance of a paper is established by looking at the previous papers of the author, by counting the citations and their importance. So now you can find recent papers about artificial intelligence ordered by relevance.

Google tried to implement a version of the PageRank algorithm from their web search. In fact, the idea of PageRank came from the way researchers rank the papers and the authors. Instead of citations, web pages have backlinks.

"Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature. The most relevant results will always appear on the first page."