Washington, Nov 10 (IANS): Google Scholar, the free search engine for scholarly literature that has transformed the way scientists consult literature online, will turn 10 Nov 18.

According to a survey by the scientific journal Nature, nearly 60 percent of scientists use the service - co-developed by an Indian-origin scientist at Google - regularly.

"Once we launched it 10 years back, usage grew exponentially. One big difference was that we were relevance-ranking (sorting results by relevance keeping in mind the user's request) which scholarly search services had not done previously," its co-creator Anurag Acharya was quoted as saying.

He still runs the service with a team of nine people.

"We crawled the full text of research articles though we did not include the full text from all the publishers when we started," Acharya added.

The primary role of Google Scholar is to give back to the research community and "we are able to do so because it is not very expensive from Google's point of view," he said.

Google Scholar has also introduced author profile pages for the scientific community.