5 ms·
Yes, Google Scholar is so useful and ubiquitous that it is dangerous. It would be far preferable to have a proper open replacement for it. The technical issues
by jmmcd 8y ago
Yes, Google Scholar is so useful and ubiquitous that it is dangerous. It would be far preferable to have a proper open replacement for it.
The technical issues are probably "easy". The ongoing maintenance costs/hassles could be solved. But the human factors would be very tricky to get right: anyone who maintained it would be under a lot of pressure in their decision-making -- your example of whether self-citations should be filtered is a good example of a decision which would have big effects and would be highly political.
One good thing about Google Scholar is (was?) that we didn't worry that Google engineers would tweak it to benefit Google researchers.
- EthanHeilman 8y agoThe biggest problem with replacing google scholar is that if you are not google, publishers will threaten to sue you for crawling their website and/or displaying information about their papers on your website. If you are Google you can just counter-threaten to delist them and stop crawling their website entirely. Google is unfortunately one of the only players that can actually offer something like google scholar.
- x3tm 8y agoYes. I wonder why other fields don't use a system similar to HEP's Inspire (http://inspirehep.net/ http://inspirehep.net/) which can give informative summaries on the researchers and their contributions (e.g., http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/Lisa.Randall.1 http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/Lisa.Randall.1 and http://inspirehep.net/search?ln=en&p=author:Lisa.Randall.1&of=hcs2 http://inspirehep.net/search?ln=en&p=author:Lisa.Randall.1&o...)