The early days
1. The group began with simply two of us. Again in 2004, entry to educational info was troublesome to navigate and sometimes restricted behind paywalls. We needed to make it attainable for researchers to have the ability to discover and browse what their friends had written. After 9 months of growth, our imaginative and prescient got here to life as Google Scholar, which might find yourself making it simple for folks to find and have interaction with analysis.
2. We bodily delivered recordsdata at first. Within the early days of Google Scholar, gradual, flaky web speeds made it onerous to collect analysis to construct this on-line analysis library. As a workaround, the group embraced a low-tech resolution dubbed the “Sneakernet.” As a substitute of relying solely on gradual downloads, publishers would load articles on bodily onerous drives and we might decide up these drives on the way in which to the workplace.
3. A child set the deadline for launching Scholar. It was crunch time main as much as Thanksgiving, and Alex was awaiting the delivery of his son, Nicholas. He was heading out on paternity go away shortly, however we nonetheless had numerous work to carry Scholar into the world. We pulled some all-nighters to fulfill our deadline — and to ensure Alex wouldn’t miss the delivery of his youngster.
4. Scholar’s product motto pays tribute to our fellow researchers. Within the analysis neighborhood, we construct on the muse laid by others, therefore our product motto: “Standing on the shoulders of giants.” It is a testomony to the collaborative nature of discovery and Scholar’s purpose to assist researchers in all places readily entry and construct upon the amassed information of those that have come earlier than. We hope to all the time be capable of assist researchers in all places see additional.
5. Our purpose is to make Scholar complete. Think about a library with tons of books, articles and analysis papers, in quite a few languages, from each nook of the world. That’s what we goal to do with Scholar. On its index, you could find peer-reviewed on-line educational journals and books, convention papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical studies and different scholarly literature.
