Google seems to have outdone itself, they’re about to launch a new service allowing you to “search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports”.

Basically it’s cool. Very cool.

They not only pull up publications, etc, but also then give you a list of their citations as sub-searches. For instance, if you search for mentions of the book “Nobody Nowhere” by Donna Williams you’ll not only get articles that mention it you’ll also find (for those publications that Google groks the format) a list of articles that have cited it.

Of course, you can also have great fun pulling up searches for friends and places you work, or where you used to work.

You can even find really obscure things, like citations for AberMUD (including one from the Australian Defence Force Academy) or some crusty old physicist.. 🙂