HN Reader

The best thing, by a long way, that Google Scholar has achieved is denying Elsevier & co a monopoly on academic search.

In most universities here in New Zealand, articles have to be published in a journal indexed by Elsevier's Scopus. Not in a Scopus-indexed journal, it does not count anymore than a reddit comment. This gives Elsevier tremendous power. But in CS/ML/AI most academics and students turn to Google Scholar first when doing searches.

> 18. A paw-sitive contribution to Physics. F.D.C Willard (otherwise known as Chester, the Siamese cat) is listed as a co-author on an article entitled: “Two, Three, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects” that explores the magnetic properties of solid helium-3 and how interactions between its atoms influence its behavior at extremely low temperatures. Chester’s starring role came about because his co-author/owner, Jack H. Hetherington wrote the entire paper with the plural “we” instead of a single “I.”

---

'Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He' by J. H. Hetherington and F. D. C. Willard [0, 1, 2]

[0] https://xkeys.com/media/wysiwyg/smartwave/porto/category/abo...

[1] https://xkeys.com/about/jackspages/fdcwillard.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard

Yes, Google deserves to be distrusted and avoided as a whole, but Google Scholar is a genuinely net good for humanity.

Pushing a half-abandoned but widely beloved project into the visibility of the bean counters at Google with a birthday announcement like that is a dangerous game. Best of luck.

Google Scholar is extremely valuable to the academic community. I am afraid that Google will decide to scrap it someday, and we will be left with a number of inferior alternatives.

20 years and still no API. In my past as an academic I've tried several times to build systems to depend on Scholar and was always taken aback by the lack of an API. I get it was not to be swallowed whole by other publishers etc, but that has reduced the potential of the product.

I use Google Scholar daily and it's been a fantastic resource. Google Scholar with Zotero completes my articles search and storage.

Btw, Anurag's last name is misspelt under the picture. It reads "Achurya" instead of "Acharya"

Edit: They fixed it

Google Scholar is fantastic stuff. I am so grateful for it. It’s crazy how easy it is to find papers these days by just going to it. University library search functions are completely useless in comparison.

Google Scholar is so good. I started doing research right when it came out and it was amazingly helpful. I can’t imagine how it was done before.

21. Google Scholar will deny access to you if you (need to) self-host a VPN on a common VPS provider. Being a Google product, it also can’t be special-cased in your routing table. (I genuinely had to retrain myself to use Google Scholar again once I no longer had that need.)

22. Switching on sort by date will impose a filter to papers published within the year, and you cannot do anything about that.

I'd not known about "F.D.C. Willard" — the nom de plume of a Michigan State physics professor's Siamese cat, Chester — who was listed as a co-author of a number of the professor's physics papers.

More on Chester and his co-author status: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard

oh no

they remembered google scholar exists

it's a great product and I don't trust google at all not to break it or mess with it

I did not know about PDF Scholar Readee extension [1]. Unfortunately the reason is that I use Firefox only (and safari iOS) and it is not available there. The AI outlines will be useful and I can think of myself using it.

I do not want to comment on number 20. I really wished that I joined CERN 10 years earlier but then it is the mistake of my parents :)

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/google-scholar-pdf-...

I love it when I receive a scolar mail informing that there is a new citation of a 20+ year old long forgotten paper.

Time goes by fast. It's interesting to think how authors son is now 20 as well.

Another interesting thing is little popup form at the end of post asking me if my opinion of Google changed for the better after reading the post. I mean maybe a bit, b the form definitely knocked the score back down.

Huh. I tried the "Listen to article" button, because I knew it was going to be generated and was curious to hear how it sounded.

Interestingly, it highlighted the words as it read. I haven't seen that before online. Not sure how useful it is (especially for anyone interested in this particular topic), but I thought it was a neat innovation nevertheless.

Related: 2014 article by Steven Levy, titled "The Gentleman Who Made Scholar": https://www.wired.com/2014/10/the-gentleman-who-made-scholar...

for people upset with google scholars lack of an API, check out openalex! awesome project. but crazy to think how much net positive google scholar has provided for the world..

The most fun fact is that it still exists!

Our department uses GScholar as a great research-focused CV generator. Not used formally except that faculty pages have a link to their GS pages.

CiteSeer we barely knew you.

Google Scholar was an absolute lifesaver during my university years! Reading this journey makes me appreciate even more how much thought and effort went into creating such a valuable resource. I remember the frustration of hitting paywalls or struggling to track down references in the library.

Slightly unrelated but I also enjoyed google's magazines section

https://books.google.com/books/magazines/language/en

I've been using Google Scholar for a long time, but I'm finding ChatGPT search with well-crafted prompts gets more focused and relevant results than a complex keyword search on GS does. However it's often still easier to find a link to the pdf version of the paper using GS, but then scihub is still an option and can work when all else fails.

A reminder to everyone: if you want a "legal" copy of a paper you can always just try emailing one of the first authors. They will 99.99% send you back a PDF.

I wish GScholar wouldn't embrace bibliometrics so much. Sort papers by date (most recent papers first) by default on an author's page rather than by citation count, or at least give author the choice to individually opt-in to sort by date by default.

The post uses the expression "delve into" :-/

Oh good, it's just a celebration and not an announcement that they're killing it.

I was hoping it would be 20 tips and tricks on how to use the service better not random fun facts about its history :-(

How long till they kill it?

“Now with AI outlines, you can quickly grasp the main points or delve into specific details that pique your interest”

is this a nod to pg’s delve blowup on twitter?

I found the post interestingly personable, something that I don't often find with Google. I've used Google Scholar for many years, before I used Elsevier and it was a gamechanger.

Fun fact about Google Scholar: it’s "free", but it’s just another soulless Google product - no clear strategy, no support, and a fragile proprietary dependency in what should be an open ecosystem. This creates inherent risks for the academic community. We need the equivalent of arXiv for Google Scholar

21. No API

Some fun Google Scholar history from another perspective.

https://youtu.be/DZ2Bgwyx3nU?t=315

I recommend you watch the rest of the video, on the subject of open/closed and enclosure of infrastructure.

> 1. The team started with just two of us.

My guess for a while has been that it was back to two of them! if that!

Unpopular opinion but I really liked Microsoft Academic instead until they canned it, sadly.

The availability of case law has been a massive bonus.

For a second I thought this was buzzfeed for some reason.