The best thing, by a long way, that Google Scholar has achieved is denying Elsevier & co a monopoly on academic search.
In most universities here in New Zealand, articles have to be published in a journal indexed by Elsevier's Scopus. Not in a Scopus-indexed journal, it does not count anymore than a reddit comment. This gives Elsevier tremendous power. But in CS/ML/AI most academics and students turn to Google Scholar first when doing searches.
Yet it still participates and encourages the bibliometrics game, which benefits the big publishers.
A simple way to make a step away from encouraging bibliometrics (which would be a step in the right direction) would be to list publications by date (most recent first) on authors pages rather than by citations count, or at least to let either users and/or authors choose the default sorting they want to use (when visiting a page for users, for their page by default for authors).
Bibliometrics, in use for over 150 years now, is not a game. That's like arguing there is no value in the PageRank algorithm, and no validity to trying to find out which journals or researchers or research teams publish better content using evidence to do so.
> which benefits the big publishers
Ignoring that it helps small researchers seems short sighted.
> A simple way to make a step ... would be to list publications by date
It's really that hard to click "year" and have that sorted?
It's almost a certainty when someone is looking for a scholar, they are looking for more highly cited work than not, so the default is probably the best use of reader times. I absolutely know when I look up an author, I am interested in what other work they did that is highly regarded more than any other factor. Once in a while I look to see what they did recently, which is exactly one click away.
But Google remains focused on popularity because that is optimal for advertising, where large audiences are the only ones that matter and there is this insidious competition for top ranking (no expectation that anyone would ever want to dig deep into search results). That sort of focus is not ideal for non-commercial research, IMHO.
I'm a proud user of sci-hub but when I was still in academics, I have never used it. My school has access to all the journals I ever needed, plus more old non-digitized ones I can borrow from library (including interlibrary access).
scihub is dying unfortunately :( the good news is it is happening just as all the fields i'm interested in except for some experimental physics & biology have moved to OA
Pushing a half-abandoned but widely beloved project into the visibility of the bean counters at Google with a birthday announcement like that is a dangerous game. Best of luck.
Google is a denger to the world, not because it's a monopoly but because it makes wonderful tools that are better than anything else available at the time. Everything else goes bust. Then google shutters tool and we're left worse off than if they did nothing.
I have similar feeing for Gmail (it's effective anti spam engine), google maps and google docs (which pioneered shared docs. It feels outdated on many fronts now, but it was a pioneer).
Good for users of Gmail, but is it a net good? Gmail spam prevention is great for the Google Apps orgs I manage. However, for the other inboxes the vast majority of spam they receive comes from @gmail.com
Do people use shared docs often in the workplace? I only used it on like two group projects in school and it probably made things more clunky than if we just wrote our portions and compiled them after. Maybe it works for some workflows but having multiple people editing the same document is chaotic, unless you delegate who does what, at which point there's no point in having it be a shared doc when the responsibilities are delegated.
anti-spam is only an issue if people dump their email anywhere.
I usually register my mail on webpages as first.last+webpage@mail.com and once they would spam this mail, it gets blacklisted.
I literally get only 1-3 real spam mails per month without any filter.
Google maps would only be a net good if the data was available under a free licence. As it is they take data from people that should have gone to a public project like OpenStreetMap.
> 18. A paw-sitive contribution to Physics. F.D.C Willard (otherwise known as Chester, the Siamese cat) is listed as a co-author on an article entitled: “Two, Three, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects” that explores the magnetic properties of solid helium-3 and how interactions between its atoms influence its behavior at extremely low temperatures. Chester’s starring role came about because his co-author/owner, Jack H. Hetherington wrote the entire paper with the plural “we” instead of a single “I.”
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'Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He' by J. H. Hetherington and F. D. C. Willard [0, 1, 2]
Sir Andre Geim [0], the only person in the world who received both the real Nobel prize in Physics and the Ig Nobel prize co-authored one of his articles [1] with his hamster Tisha.
Google Scholar is extremely valuable to the academic community. I am afraid that Google will decide to scrap it someday, and we will be left with a number of inferior alternatives.
Google employs thousands of researchers who would be less productive (and upset) if they scrapped it. That alone is probably enough to make it worthwhile to keep it going, at least until a good alternative emerges.
Given that they have killed products with millions of users, including a lot of paying users, relying on this is optimistic. Google doesn't seem to care about major inconvenience they cause, like with the Google Domains sale Squarespace.
Google employs a lot of academics that probably use it. And of course they have a few AI related products that are probably being trained on scientific content as well. I bet Google Scholar feeds data into that effort. My guess is that keeping google scholar up and running isn't breaking the bank for them and it is actually a valuable resource for them.
Well, at least Google Scholar is aligned with Google's core business: search. It seems silly for Google to scrap search features. On the other hand, I'm not sure if Google Scholar is aligned with their real core business: ads.
20 years and still no API. In my past as an academic I've tried several times to build systems to depend on Scholar and was always taken aback by the lack of an API. I get it was not to be swallowed whole by other publishers etc, but that has reduced the potential of the product.
Google Scholar is fantastic stuff. I am so grateful for it. It’s crazy how easy it is to find papers these days by just going to it. University library search functions are completely useless in comparison.
Readit News
In most universities here in New Zealand, articles have to be published in a journal indexed by Elsevier's Scopus. Not in a Scopus-indexed journal, it does not count anymore than a reddit comment. This gives Elsevier tremendous power. But in CS/ML/AI most academics and students turn to Google Scholar first when doing searches.
A simple way to make a step away from encouraging bibliometrics (which would be a step in the right direction) would be to list publications by date (most recent first) on authors pages rather than by citations count, or at least to let either users and/or authors choose the default sorting they want to use (when visiting a page for users, for their page by default for authors).
Bibliometrics, in use for over 150 years now, is not a game. That's like arguing there is no value in the PageRank algorithm, and no validity to trying to find out which journals or researchers or research teams publish better content using evidence to do so.
> which benefits the big publishers
Ignoring that it helps small researchers seems short sighted.
> A simple way to make a step ... would be to list publications by date
It's really that hard to click "year" and have that sorted?
It's almost a certainty when someone is looking for a scholar, they are looking for more highly cited work than not, so the default is probably the best use of reader times. I absolutely know when I look up an author, I am interested in what other work they did that is highly regarded more than any other factor. Once in a while I look to see what they did recently, which is exactly one click away.
But Google remains focused on popularity because that is optimal for advertising, where large audiences are the only ones that matter and there is this insidious competition for top ranking (no expectation that anyone would ever want to dig deep into search results). That sort of focus is not ideal for non-commercial research, IMHO.
Deleted Comment
Having pretty wide journal access through my institution means I don’t need to reach out to sci-hub.
Dead Comment
Google spanks everyone else on robustness and responsiveness
Honestly, if we compare Google to Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Meta, isn't Google the least evil one?
I literally get only 1-3 real spam mails per month without any filter.
Like you can ask to find a restaurant and it won't point you to the closer one but to one that is few km away instead.
- Google Search
- YouTube (more debateable, but I think it's a marvel)
- Google Books
- ChromeBooks
- Android
- Google Calendar
- Google Earth
- Google Drive
- Google Docs
- Waze
- Android Auto
- Google Pay
- Kubernetes
- Go
- VP8 / VP9
I'd rather take all those products than leave them.
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'Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He' by J. H. Hetherington and F. D. C. Willard [0, 1, 2]
[0] https://xkeys.com/media/wysiwyg/smartwave/porto/category/abo...
[1] https://xkeys.com/about/jackspages/fdcwillard.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Geim
[1] https://repository.ubn.ru.nl//bitstream/handle/2066/249681/2...
Btw, Anurag's last name is misspelt under the picture. It reads "Achurya" instead of "Acharya"
Edit: They fixed it