8 ms·
Changes to Google Scholar
- frozenport 9y agoThe cite feature is really awsome, and I started using it when I noticed a day or two ago! No more needing to navigate publisher websites, or searching for an obscure article. Would be cool to have a way to cite any url directly to EndNote.
- tmalsburg2 9y agoIn my experience the quality of the BibTeX offered by Google Scholar is really low, too much missing or incorrect information. Crossref is much better: https://www.crossref.org/ https://www.crossref.org/
- qznc 9y agoI fear I will forget about that. Would have preferred a cite text link instead of that quotation icon.
- dingaling 9y ago"If you thought Google Scholar had about twenty different screens, you'd be half right." It also seems that Google has about 20 different blogging outlets. Shouldn't they all be on blog.google by now?
- zimmund 9y agoIf there's one thing Google does right it's fragmentation :)
- webwanderings 9y agoAcademia.edu has eaten their lunch. Don't know if two compare deeply but people use academia.edu more than anything else I know in this category.
- steren 9y agoacademia.edu? you mean this website that is entirely behind a login wall?
- sackofmugs 9y agoThat'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.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoPeople in my field use Google Scholar and NIH for search, but researchgate as a kind of cv.
- kensai 9y agoRG is also used to ask question and get some really useful answers. At least in my field (biomedicine) the community is very helpful.
- dpq 9y agoInstead of becoming a more or less of a clone of Facebook news feed for researchers, RG has become infuriatingly full of nag boxes, and in its efforts to get you use the website more prevents you from actually using it at all.
- frozenport 9y agoI disagree. Most posts are manuscripts, or parts of them. It really helps for me to keep up with my field.
- puzzle 9y agoWow, both Alex and Anurag are still working on Scholar. They started the project almost fifteen years ago. Google infrastructure all around it changed entirely over that time; I'm wondering if this is another major rewrite or "just" a substantial UI update to meet Material Design guidelines.
- oh_sigh 9y agoIt seems just like a UI tweak. Which is fine...but anyone who is doing serious research or is just an enamored amateur will quickly get over the quirks of their tools.
- Horatius 9y agoUgh! What a horrible UI revision. Mobile has completely destroyed web design for anything larger than an iPhone. Stupid round pictures? Really? (And thousands of clean square ones now vignetted and made to look stupid against a round background?) Items in the Areas of Interest list chopped off with a ... and so made illegible? More empty white space pushing actual data off the bottom of the screen? The Metrics section used to be extremely interesting, with comparative data from many fields; that looks to be completely gone -- how could something that useful be eliminated? [Wait, the "learn more" page says the subcategories are still there in the left column, but I don't see any left column.] Come on, Google. Don't any of your people use actual computers any more?
- userbinator 9y agoAgreed completely. More insulting is the fact that this is dumbing-down of Google Scholar, and so presumably aimed at a demographic of above-average intelligence and emphasis on content compared to the typical computer user. "Cite" and "Save" are self-explanatory, icons are not. They're also unusual on a line with plenty of other text (which no doubt they would now decide to "iconify" in the future...) I've seen enough of this trend that phrases like "cleaner look" make me think of an empty room left behind by someone who decided to throw away everything you need --- bland and useless. It's beyond stupid.
- dpq 9y agoI suppose we should be overjoyed anyway. This update means that Google is not shutting Scholar down - at the very least, not today. Knowing their habit of axing products that do not quite attain civilization-level scale, it's always a grim possibility I keep in mind.
- questionman4 9y agoIn Google Scholar - just a few days ago - it used to highlight whatever search term you used on the main page. Did this change with the new version? Because when I search "case law" now, when I go into a particular case, the search term is no longer highlighted.
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- n1000 9y agoScholar 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.
- Jabbles 9y agoYour argument is "it's really good", "they've slightly changed it", "therefore they don't care about it"? Presumably you'd be happier if the UI changed from week to week?
- geraltofrivia 9y agoIts interesting how the big guys never truly paid attention to their academic search portals. I remember MS Academic Search to be very useful, which thereafter remained as is to the point of being clearly outdated. And then, on a bright sunny day, discontinued. Only to emerge years later, imbued with a fresh interface, horrible search and confusing UI. Scholar too felt ignored like its a bastard child, but this new update looks promising, not in term of their changes, but due to the fact that this implies they haven't boxed it yet. Also, they haven't "revamped" the search, so I'm not worried about the core functionality. Most likely this behavior stems from the fact that this service doesn't generate revenues for them (I'm assuming so, please correct me if I'm wrong). If so, then how does a small company keep up its own academic search portal?: Semantic Scholar by Allen.
- Vinnl 9y ago> this service doesn't generate revenues for them (I'm assuming so, please correct me if I'm wrong). Considering that there are quite a few researchers working at Google, I can imagine that the fact that they have this tool available to them indirectly causes some revenue. (And also, goodwill in the academic community, i.e. a community of potential future employees.)
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- ismail 9y ago1. Anyone have an idea of the algorithm used for ranking? Page rank? 2. Anyone know where to get my hands on a data set of papers with citations in an easy to parse format? Would like to do some analysis
- Vinnl 9y ago1. It's not a simply algorithm, but yes, page rank plays a role (using citations rather than, or in addition to, hyperlinks). 2. crossref.org has an API? Or do you want the actual papers included - because if so, open access needs to see significantly more uptake first.
- fbgugli 9y agoGoogle .. Oh my keep away from this greedy organisation much as possible
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- do5 9y ago"Author profile pages got a cleaner look, especially on mobile devices. Rest assured, we did not change your citation counts - at least not intentionally."
- soyiuz 9y agoPlease please please fix "sort by date" filter. Searching for "natural language processing" returns 3,330,000 results with the default "sort by relevance" and 4,730 with "sort by date."
- userbinator 9y agoI've noticed this completely nonsensical behaviour with regular Google too. "Sort by" shouldn't ever be a "filter" --- but an ordering. The result counts are usually highly inflated and approximate anyway (i.e. can you eventually actually get all 3M+ results?), so perhaps they don't mean all that much. The best explanation for that anomaly, which is more of an excuse, is that they don't want to spend computing power sorting all the results. Nevermind the fact that sorting by date is probably much easier than computing "relevance" and sorting by that...
- popcorncolonel 9y agoAnd they're from 4 days ago... What about the arXiv papers that were posted yesterday?
- aargh_aargh 9y agoOnly guessing, but maybe they don't have a date for the rest. In that case one of the sensible things to do is what they seem to be doing - only showing those for which they do have a date.
- JorgeGT 9y agoIf anyone from Google Scholar is reading this, please, please, add a DOI field to the BiBTex citation. It is required in every serious journal and it's tiresome to copy the citation, then open the article page and look for the DOI to add manually. This small change would be more welcome that any other UI refreshment, I guarantee it.
- popcorncolonel 9y agoI wish there were an easy way to browse the most recent papers by category. Or get an email of the daily digest of what's added today for my favorite categories. I know arXiv does this, but it's in such an unreadable format that it makes me just want to read it on the site.
- epaulson 9y agoThe change I really wish Scholar would announce is adding an official API. I'd like to be able to link papers in my library back to some kind of Scholar ID and walk out the citation and 'related' articles from there. I'd feel much better if the only option wasn't a screen scraping library. It's really a shame that no university library consortium has tried to build this themselves.
- aargh_aargh 9y agoNot an API and not really maintained, but here's a handy client: https://github.com/ckreibich/scholar.py https://github.com/ckreibich/scholar.py
- jknz 9y agoTyping "sch<tab>" in the chrome address bar used to search on Google scholar directly. It went broken yesterday on my browser.