Ugh, I got reliant on it during that window of functionality, and now I gotta beat it with a stick to make it work. Google scholar alert setup janky as hell.
This is what is driving me mad about Google lately. I don’t want AI junk or something sponsored. Or an undergrad honors thesis as the 1st response! I want the BEST info! I have been spoiled I suppose w/ better searches/search engines working well in the past.
Yeah, I sometimes use Google Scholar for work - it's convenient if a researcher has their own page. Otherwise I use specialised indexes like Web of Science or Scopus. These are paid, but lens.org seems to be a pretty good free alternative.
The Lens serves all the patents and scholarly work in the world as a free, open and secure digital public good, with user privacy a paramount focus.
What's the incentive for Google Scholar enshittification? Was Scholar ever a profit center for Alphabet, or is it enshittifying through neglect?
Interesting. My GS searches put highly-cited older things first. Do you sort by date? A field with hundreds of articles is hard to enter with any lit search except a review article. Agree GS does not yield "best" hits, but it is more expansive. I prefer to use multiple search engines.
Yes. I am routinely amazed at how poorly it does in helping me find a particular source article. The various search options by year aren’t terribly helpful either.
Google scholar is a mess. I recently looked up Judith Butler's Gender Trouble to see how many citations it has (just for a comparison w/another text) & the book did not come up on the first page. Just checked again & same situation. The book w/ 97194 citations is on page 2.
Have you tried The Lens? www.lens.org Between it, Semantic Scholar, and Jurn (and a few others), I'd say it is the one I've had the best luck with
The Lens serves all the patents and scholarly work in the world as a free, open and secure digital public good, with user privacy a paramount focus.
That's doubly frustrating, because a lot of other scholarly search engines are now also shit. I did a search last year on Scifinder (the major chemistry database) and my first hit was on washing machines. Google Scholar, weirdly, gave me the paper I was looking for.+
This sucks as an independent environmental historian. Scientists posting articles on social media is great but not a catch all. Harder to stay up to date without Scholer or similar search.