20 years of Google Scholar

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).

> the bibliometrics game

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.

To be fair, you did hedge and say "almost a certainty" and maybe that's true. But speaking for myself, I generally couldn't care less about citation count. If anything, my interest in a document may be inversely proportional to the citation count. And that's because I'm often looking for either a. "lost gems" - things are are actually great/useful research, but that got overlooked for whatever reason, or b. historical references to obscure topics that I'm deep-diving into.

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).

> If anything, my interest in a document may be inversely proportional to the citation count.

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.

Don't over-interpret what I'm saying here. I'm not on some "mission from God" to ignore all high citation count papers. My point is only that sometimes I want to pointedly look through things that aren't "what others are looking at and building on", on the basis that sometimes things get "lost" for whatever reason. Ideas show up, are maybe ahead of their time, or get published in the wrong journal, or get overshadowed by a "hot" contemporaneous item, etc., and then stay hidden due to path dependence. My goal is to make an active effort to break that path dependent flow and maybe dredge up something that is actually useful but that has remained "below the radar".

The entire point is that experts are doing this triage for you, and building upon fruitful lanes of research.

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.