Shortly after releasing our blog post titled "HeinOnline or Google Scholar? Why You Should Start Your Research in HeinOnline First", Google Scholar contacted us. We want to take a moment to share with you some of the things that Google Scholar informed us of.
First, without our knowledge or awareness, Google informed us that they created a whole new index just prior to launching the new Google Scholar search that includes legal opinions and journals. Google indicated that they improved their indexing algorithms and subsequently rebuilt the index. With this new index in place, Google Scholar now includes an additional 250,000 documents/sections/articles from HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library bringing the total number of documents indexed to 750,000. We still note, that this is not comprehensive of HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library, which is comprised of more than 1 million articles, notes, comments, reviews, legislation, cases, decisions, contents, editorials and other miscellaneous documents or sections.
With the new index, Google Scholar also resolved the discrepancies found in the Cited By numbers. Our previous example "Government Responsibility for Constitutional Torts" now indicates that it is cited by 107 documents in Google Scholar. And, it includes "Where Rights Begin: The Problem of Burdens on the Free Exercise of Religion" which was omitted before the new index was created.
In response to our post, Google also provided more detail about how they index the metadata and why authors such as that of "W HEN" would appear in the results as an author of an article.
