This new offering from Google has attracted much press attention. "Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web." I worry however about one aspect: comprehensiveness. There is an interesting tendency amongst (graduate) students to assume that if a quick search fails to reveal an item, it does not exist. This was particularly prevalent at a time when many electronic journals in say the ISI/WOS database did not go back before 1981. This did actually lead to an outbreak of claims in journals to have discovered a new molecule, when in fact that molecule had been very well recorded in the pre 1981 literature. One wonders how long it would take for eg failure to find a reference in http://scholar.google.com/ to the assumption that the item does not exist. Thus my brief search (taking the form author:name) revealed about 100 articles less than I know I have authored. On the other hand, it is free! And presumably can only get better!! (unless of course publishers start putting a robot exclusion on their ToCs) -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax); rzepahs@mac.com (iChat) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK. (Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email. If expected reply not received, please phone/fax).