While Google Calendar has been getting most of the press these days, I noticed a few new features over at Google Scholar that were quite impressive.

First, in an effort to help folks stay up-to-date on current research in a given field (their example is quantum computing), you can change the sort ordering from everything to “Recent articles“. The good folks at Google then attempt to rank the articles “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” (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/keeping-up-with-recent-research.html).

Trying this out for my own personal interests (Virginia social history), I was pleasantly surprised at how well the actual results were that got returned. In fact, the top result was Pulitizer Prize winning author Rhyss Isaac’s Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdon. Not too shabby for a computer algorithm

The other, perhaps more interesting (and more useful) item is the ability to export results to citation managers (you have to set it in the preferences). They currently support BibTeX, EndNote, RefMan, and Refworks. This seems to work reasonably well…at least for modern works. My test case was a book we’re digitizing published in 1863 (Bastiles of the North). Probably because its from a citation, and not the actual work, I never got to the import stage in RefWorks.

Now, if Google would just open up their search API for GoogleScholar…