A slight gripe about Google scholar

While the community gets hooked on Google Scholar (see articles in Nature) it is worth noting its flaws rather than becoming caught up in the general excitement. One of the hyped features of Google Scholar is that it returns the most cited papers first. However, the most cited papers are rarely what we want (highly cited papers are easily found through ISI's Web of Knowledge in any case); often, when we want to cast our net wider than the restricted journal set chosen by ISI, we are looking for good papers that have been missed out by the citation machine. It is the old complaint that 'popular' is not necessarily 'good', and this problem is magnified rather than mitigated by Google's search engine, which relentlessly seeks out the popular.

Even then, does it really find the most cited papers? As ever, I looked for myself, and found my most highly cited paper was actually the most difficult to find using keywords. In the end I had to resort to typing the exact title in (and yes, it was more highly cited according to Google Scholar than any of the other entries it had found). The problems were twofold: firstly, Google Scholar had indexed the same paper under several different entries; secondly, it had failed to pick up the freely available copy of the paper available through our publication server at UCL, eprints, and instead gone for the restricted access copy held by the publisher. Yes, these are presumably teething problems with what is still a Beta test, but it all sets a worrying trend for the future when academics will try to get their papers to the top of Google, and not strive to produce the best research they can.