Let me try to describe Scholar from a different angle: Google relies on a lot of experts in their respective fields in order to be successful. And they need to stay close to the state of the art and current research. Google scholar is just the kind of database that helps with that. It makes sense to build it for internal use. And given that Google is also good at data analysis, it makes sense to open it up to the public and learn from the usage data. For example: What are hot topics? Which papers are read often in the community? This data can give an extra level of insight into what is going on in the research communities.
All in all Google Scholar is really cool, their database and their methods of updating and aggregating data are really good, we don't want to diminish their success.
However, their interface hasn't really evolved, and I feel like their algorithm doesn't benefit from the algorithmic improvements on Google's main search engine at all (eg research questions, wikipedia snippets, taxonomy of field of studies...)
Given that 9 out of 10 researchers and PhD students use Google Scholar, allowing for a more open environment and greater customization of how articles are searched seems to be quite valuable.
I have some ideas about the google scholar algorithm, I think they too use a mix of semantic search, keyword search and heuristic weighting based on the citation graph.
But I don't think google will adopt our algorithm, this is why we created our app! Indeed, even using the terminology "seminal article" can be controversial, and Google is not there for that. Our application does not have the same goal: we have created a search engine optimized for literature reviews. We don't necessarily select the information that works best with the search, we try to offer a representative corpus.
Academic here- Scholar is used quite a bit, but they are competing with some big players, some that offer a lot of full-text Google doesn't. It can be useful to get your research started, but I don't know anyone who has used Scholar from start to finish for a piece of scholarship. So you're probably right on the money.
I'll be inconvenienced if I lose Keep- it's very handy and I use it extensively on a daily basis. But there are plenty of competitors in that market space- some excellent ones are open source.
The major use of the site is that you can follow researchers who interest you and be notified when they upload new papers (and likewise allow people to follow you) - the notifications for Google Scholar are not terribly useful for that.
Scholar is by far the most powerful search site for academic literature. They not only find new publications weeks before other platforms do, but also find far more literature from all sources.
Nevertheless, I feel like this is one of these half-hearted Google projects and doesn't fully live up to its potential. This relatively subtle UI change is a good example that they don't seem to care too much about taking it further. I just pray Google doesn't shut it down one day.
That's funny, because I was just thinking how Academia.edu has become a joke site, while everyone in my field uses Google Scholar daily. It's almost impossible to find references, put together a bib list, or navigate through related work without Google Scholar.
As an academic that works in a research area where other indexes (like WoS, etc.) have really bad coverage, and as an academic that has a double surname and accented characters which other indexes handle terribly wrong and end up creating many duplicate profiles with a few papers each, I feel very grateful for the great tool that is Google Scholar.
Additionally, thanks to it and its recommendation system I have found many interesting papers that I wouldn't have read otherwise.
I really hope that Google keep maintaining this tool for many years.
Do you know google scholar? That's basically what it's for. Might as well be added to the list of advices: searching for the important papers with google scholar or CiteSeerX.
Well, there already is Google Scholar. I don't know precisely how much effort goes into the ranking algorithms used there -- but I do already use it in preference to Pubmed.
The issue that I find with Google scholar is that it seems very biased by my publications. So it's very good at telling me the latest work related to what I used to work on, but not necessarily what I am currently interested in.
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