Illiteracy & Innumeracy of Google ScholarSamples May-June, 2009

Dr. Peter Jacso

ProfessorDept. of Information and Computer Sciences

University of Hawaii

Jacso

Boolean OR to broaden the search ends up being narrowed by an order of magnitude in the hands of GS

Jacso

Narrowing the year range increases the hit counts in GS

Jacso

What GS can fancy for author, journal name, publication year?

Street address, menu options names, part of fax numbers – you name it

Jacso

And the true metadata in the

source document

Absurd citation matching yielding a too good to be true citedness count for a 1-year old paper

Jacso

The paper was seemingly cited years/ decade before it was published – according to GS

Jacso

Ghost authors and lost authors + phantom

citations –

courtesy of Google Scholar

Jacso

From Blackwell’s digital collection alone GS mis-identifies 58,000 authors as F. Password

Jacso

Author names made from menu options

Jacso

38,600 papers by extremely productive and well-cited author named TOC View

Jacso

The real authors are robbed blind of citations

Jacso

Except some which GS could not match up and credit to the ghost author TOC View

Jacso

GS

Jacso

What is publication year – page number, ZIP-code qualifier, you name it

Jacso

GS #1 item for PY=2010

Jacso

GS #2 item PY=2010

Jacso