Google to offer new service for academic researchers

Google has announced plans for a new search program targeted to academics.  The new “Google Scholar,” currently in beta release, is designed “to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, books, technical reports, theses, abstracts and preprints.”

One very interesting aspect of the new engine is that it has software to pull citations out of on-line articles and present them as results, even if the cited documents are not on the web. The company hopes that the service will encourage publishers and authors to put more academic content on the web.

The site is up and running and available for searches at http://scholar.google.com.