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... I'm not in formal academia, I care very little about publishing research myself (at least not from a bibliometric perspective. For me "publishing" might be writing a blog post or maybe submitting a pre-print somewhere) so I'm just not part of that whole (racket|game|whatever-you-want-to-call-it).
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.
It works great for its audience, likely better than any other product. Do you think your desire for rare outweighs the masses that don’t? If you want rare, why even use a tool designed for relevant? Go dig through the stacks at your favorite old library, bookstore, cellar, wherever.
I’d suspect if you were handed random low citation count articles you’d soon find they are not gems. They’re not cited for a reason.
Heck, want low citation count items? Go find a list of journal rankings (well crap, more rankings…) in the field you’re interested in, take the lowest rated ones, and go mine those crap journals for gems. Voila! Problem solved.
And I bet you find why they’re low ranked searching for gems in slop.
That said, I personally don't have any problem with Google Scholar since you can, as you say, trivially sort by date.
This makes little sense to me. The citation count gives you an idea of what others are looking at and building upon. As far as I’ve seen, having a low citation count isn’t an uncommon phenomena, but having a high citation count is. In terms of information gained while triaging papers to read, a low citation count gives you almost no information.
To think that as an outsider to a field you are qualified to discover 'gems' (and between the lines here is a bit of an assumption that one is more qualified than researchers in the field, who are of course trying to discover 'gems') seems misguided.
But I am educated in my chosen field and I read the same books and journals and attend the same conferences, as the people you're referring to. The biggest difference is only in incentives and imposed constraints. I have a lot more freedom since I'm not operating within the "publish or perish" paradigm.
Assuming there’s some “incentives and imposed constraints” anywhere uniform to academics that you’re magically free from that lets you turn low cited papers into gems at a higher rate than all of academia combined is the most self delusional, simplistic, aggrandizing belief I’ve heard in a long time.