[Math] MathSciNet vs Google Scholar

mathscinetsoft-question

What are the pros and cons of the MathSciNet database vs Google Scholar?

I don't have access to Mathscinet so this question is out of curiosity, and also this question where MathSciNet is used to find paper counts. I reckon Google Scholar will almost always be the more comprehensive of the two with higher paper counts for any particular author and includes papers that don't use the MSC codes as well papers from other subjects that may be of mathematical interest but aren't included in mathscinet.

One definitely annoying thing about Google is that in the advanced search it doesn't have a mathematics only category, but lumps it in with computer science and engineering so you sometimes need to add something like -"computer science" -"engineering" mathematics to your search term to filter out unwanted results, which isn't ideal.

Best Answer

  1. Google scholar is free; MathSciNet requires a subscription. In practice the usual effect of this is that one needs to access MathSciNet via a university IP address rather than one's home address. But it also means that one can't provide web pointers to MathSciNet searches or reviews and expect them to be usable by people who are not themselves professional mathematicians; it is possible to link to bibliographic entries for individual articles but non-subscribers are not shown the review text, only the bibliographic data.

  2. MathSciNet covers essentially all mathematics journals; Google scholar covers only what it can find online. On the other hand, Google scholar covers unpublished preprints and some published mathematical material in related disciplines (e.g. theoretical computer science conferences) that is not as comprehensively reviewed in MathSciNet.

  3. MathSciNet is indexed only by title and abstract/review text; Google scholar is indexed by the full text of the article.

  4. Some articles in MathSciNet have a review written by a knowledgeable reviewer, that puts the article into context better than the authors did. (On the other hand, many MathSciNet entries merely repeat the authors' abstract.)

  5. MathSciNet has much more reliable publication data than Google scholar: its BibTeX is generally usable as-is, it properly collects papers by the same author and distinguishes papers by different authors, and it doesn't have duplicate entries for the same paper. However, Google scholar generally has better citation data than MathSciNet: although MathSciNet lists the papers that cite a given paper, the ones that it lists are generally a small subset of the ones Google scholar finds.

  6. Google scholar will provide links to as many different online copies of a paper as it can find (e.g. preprints from the author's home page); MathSciNet will only provide one link, to the official published copy, and will do so only for a subset of the journals it covers.