Research methods constitute an indispensable tool for scholars engaged in scientific inquiry. Investigating how scholars use research methods throughout their careers can reveal distinct patterns in method adoption, providing valuable insights for novice researchers in selecting appropriate methods. This study employs a comprehensive dataset comprising full-text journal articles and bibliographic records from the Library and Information Science (LIS) domain. Utilizing an automated classification model based on full-text cognitive analysis, the research methods employed by LIS scholars are systematically identified. Topic modeling was then conducted using Top2Vec. Subsequently, author name disambiguation is performed, and academic age is calculated for each scholar. This study focuses on 435 senior scholars with an academic age of more than 14 years and a consistent publication record at five-year intervals, covering a total of 6,116 articles. The corpus covers 16 research method categories and 20 research topics. The findings indicate that bibliometric methods are the most frequently used across career stages, accounting for 19.61% among early-career scholars and 31.81% among senio
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as scholar recommenders, shaping who is seen as an expert in academia. Existing audits remain English-centric, single discipline, and persona-agnostic, leaving the source of output variability poorly understood. To this end, we propose a benchmark that disentangles the effects of model choice and prompt design on recommendations. We audit 43 LLMs by varying persona prompts (language, location, role-and-task) and context (field, seniority, k). Recommended scholars are compared against Semantic Scholar over six scientific disciplines to measure technical quality (factuality, coverage) and social representativeness (diversity, parity). Basic technical quality is driven by model choice, factuality and parity by context, and diversity by location. South Africa prompts yield less factual lists, while Japan prompts yield highly factual but homogeneous lists skewed toward highly productive scholars. Prompt design is thus a non-trivial axis of LLM-based scholar discovery and should be systematically audited alongside model choice.
Academic codes associated with research papers are valuable resources for scholars. In specialized fields outside computer science, code availability is often limited, making effective code retrieval essential. Google Scholar is a crucial academic search tool. If a code published in the paper is not retrievable via Google Scholar, its accessibility and impact are significantly reduced. This study takes the term "accelerated degradation" combined with "reliability" as an example, and finds that, for papers published by Elsevier, only GitHub links included in abstracts are comprehensively retrieved by Google Scholar. When such links appear within the main body of a paper, even in the "Data Availability" section, they may be ignored and become unsearchable. These findings highlight the importance of strategically placing GitHub links in abstracts to enhance code discoverability on Google Scholar.
Google Scholar is a vital tool for engineering scholars, enabling efficient literature searches and facilitating academic dissemination. Elsevier, as one of the largest publishers of engineering journals, produces essential research that scholars rely on. The pre-proof policy, adopted by Elsevier for certain journals, allows articles to be published online in their accepted draft form before final proofreading and formatting. However, this study empirically demonstrates that the pre-proof publication policy hinders comprehensive indexing by Google Scholar. Articles published under this policy are only partially indexed, often limited to titles and abstracts, while crucial sections such as introductions, methods, results, discussions, conclusions, appendices, and data availability statements remain unsearchable. This problem has persisted for years, resulting in reduced visibility and accessibility of certain Elsevier articles. To improve academic dissemination, both Elsevier and Google Scholar must address this problem by modifying publishing policies or enhancing indexing practices. Additionally, this paper explores strategies that authors can use to mitigate the issue and ensure
This paper evaluates the performance of six open-weight LLMs (llama3-8b, llama3.1-8b, gemma2-9b, mixtral-8x7b, llama3-70b, llama3.1-70b) in recommending experts in physics across five tasks: top-k experts by field, influential scientists by discipline, epoch, seniority, and scholar counterparts. The evaluation examines consistency, factuality, and biases related to gender, ethnicity, academic popularity, and scholar similarity. Using ground-truth data from the American Physical Society and OpenAlex, we establish scholarly benchmarks by comparing model outputs to real-world academic records. Our analysis reveals inconsistencies and biases across all models. mixtral-8x7b produces the most stable outputs, while llama3.1-70b shows the highest variability. Many models exhibit duplication, and some, particularly gemma2-9b and llama3.1-8b, struggle with formatting errors. LLMs generally recommend real scientists, but accuracy drops in field-, epoch-, and seniority-specific queries, consistently favoring senior scholars. Representation biases persist, replicating gender imbalances (reflecting male predominance), under-representing Asian scientists, and over-representing White scholars. Des
Interdisciplinary collaboration has become a driving force for scientific breakthroughs, and evaluating scholars' performance in interdisciplinary researches is essential for promoting such collaborations. However, traditional scholar evaluation methods based solely on individual achievements do not consider interdisciplinary cooperation, creating a challenge for interdisciplinary scholar evaluation and recommendation. To address this issue, we propose a scholar embedding model that quantifies and represents scholars based on global semantic information and social influence, enabling real-time tracking of scholars' research trends. Our model incorporates semantic information and social influence for interdisciplinary scholar evaluation, laying the foundation for future interdisciplinary collaboration discovery and recommendation projects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on a sample of scholars from the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.
The launch of Google Scholar back in 2004 meant a revolution not only in the scientific information search market but also in research evaluation processes. Its dynamism, unparalleled coverage, and uncontrolled indexing make of Google Scholar an unusual product, especially when compared to traditional bibliographic databases. Conceived primarily as a discovery tool for academic information, it presents a number of limitations as a bibliometric tool. The main objective of this chapter is to show how Google Scholar operates and how its core database may be used for bibliometric purposes. To do this, the general features of the search engine (in terms of document typologies, disciplines, and coverage) are analysed. Lastly, several bibliometric tools based on Google Scholar data, both official (Google Scholar Metrics, Google Scholar Citations), and some developed by third parties (H Index Scholar, Publishers Scholar Metrics, Proceedings Scholar Metrics, Journal Scholar Metrics, Scholar Mirrors), as well as software to collect and process data from this source (Publish or Perish, Scholarometer) are introduced, aiming to illustrate the potential bibliometric uses of this source.
Scholar Inbox is a new open-access platform designed to address the challenges researchers face in staying current with the rapidly expanding volume of scientific literature. We provide personalized recommendations, continuous updates from open-access archives (arXiv, bioRxiv, etc.), visual paper summaries, semantic search, and a range of tools to streamline research workflows and promote open research access. The platform's personalized recommendation system is trained on user ratings, ensuring that recommendations are tailored to individual researchers' interests. To further enhance the user experience, Scholar Inbox also offers a map of science that provides an overview of research across domains, enabling users to easily explore specific topics. We use this map to address the cold start problem common in recommender systems, as well as an active learning strategy that iteratively prompts users to rate a selection of papers, allowing the system to learn user preferences quickly. We evaluate the quality of our recommendation system on a novel dataset of 800k user ratings, which we make publicly available, as well as via an extensive user study. https://www.scholar-inbox.com/
Quantitatively profiling a scholar's scientific impact is important to modern research society. Current practices with bibliometric indicators (e.g., h-index), lists, and networks perform well at scholar ranking, but do not provide structured context for scholar-centric, analytical tasks such as profile reasoning and understanding. This work presents GeneticFlow (GF), a suite of novel graph-based scholar profiles that fulfill three essential requirements: structured-context, scholar-centric, and evolution-rich. We propose a framework to compute GF over large-scale academic data sources with millions of scholars. The framework encompasses a new unsupervised advisor-advisee detection algorithm, a well-engineered citation type classifier using interpretable features, and a fine-tuned graph neural network (GNN) model. Evaluations are conducted on the real-world task of scientific award inference. Experiment outcomes show that the F1 score of best GF profile significantly outperforms alternative methods of impact indicators and bibliometric networks in all the 6 computer science fields considered. Moreover, the core GF profiles, with 63.6%-66.5% nodes and 12.5%-29.9% edges of the full p
The rapid growth in natural language processing (NLP) over the last couple years has generated student interest and excitement in learning more about the field. In this paper, we present two types of students that NLP courses might want to train. First, an "NLP engineer" who is able to flexibly design, build and apply new technologies in NLP for a wide range of tasks. Second, an "NLP scholar" who is able to pose, refine and answer questions in NLP and how it relates to the society, while also learning to effectively communicate these answers to a broader audience. While these two types of skills are not mutually exclusive -- NLP engineers should be able to think critically, and NLP scholars should be able to build systems -- we think that courses can differ in the balance of these skills. As educators at Small Liberal Arts Colleges, the strengths of our students and our institution favors an approach that is better suited to train NLP scholars. In this paper we articulate what kinds of skills an NLP scholar should have, and then adopt a backwards design to propose course components that can aid the acquisition of these skills.
Retrieval-augmented generation is increasingly effective in answering scientific questions from literature, but many state-of-the-art systems are expensive and closed-source. We introduce Ai2 Scholar QA, a free online scientific question answering application. To facilitate research, we make our entire pipeline public: as a customizable open-source Python package and interactive web app, along with paper indexes accessible through public APIs and downloadable datasets. We describe our system in detail and present experiments analyzing its key design decisions. In an evaluation on a recent scientific QA benchmark, we find that Ai2 Scholar QA outperforms competing systems.
Online academic profiles are used by scholars to reflect a desired image to their online audience. In Google Scholar, scholars can select a subset of co-authors for presentation in a central location on their profile using a social feature called the Co-authroship panel. In this work, we examine whether scientometrics and reciprocality can explain the observed selections. To this end, we scrape and thoroughly analyze a novel set of 120,000 Google Scholar profiles, ranging across four disciplines and various academic institutions. Our results suggest that scholars tend to favor co-authors with higher scientometrics over others for inclusion in their co-authorship panels. Interestingly, as one's own scientometrics are higher, the tendency to include co-authors with high scientometrics is diminishing. Furthermore, we find that reciprocality is central to explaining scholars' selections.
The assignment of document and publication types in scholarly databases plays an important role in bibliometrics, for example in decision-making or university rankings. However, scholarly databases apply different curation strategies and taxonomies when classifying documents which makes it difficult to compare results from different database providers. In this study, the bibliometric databases OpenAlex, Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed and Semantic Scholar are used to analyse the extent of data variation and compare different approaches to taxonomy and data curation. Using a shared corpus of 9,575,603 publications from 2012 to 2022, we found large differences in the classification of document types such as research articles and editorials in these databases. We can also show that many of the records that lack a publication type in OpenAlex are classified as conference proceedings in Scopus and Semantic Scholar.
This paper contributes a new idea for exploring research funding effects on scholar performance. By collecting details of 9,501 research grants received by principal investigators from universities in the U.S. social sciences from 2000 to 2019 and data on their publications and citations in the Microsoft Academic Graph and Web of Science bibliographic collections, we build a novel dataset of grants and article counts, citations, and journal CiteScore. Based on this dataset, we first introduce three instrumental variables (IVs) suitable for isolating endogeneity issues in the study of competing grant effects, namely scholars political hegemony in academia, imitation isomorphic behavior among scholars, and project familiarity. Then, this study explains the research funding effects by combining the three IVs with a two-stage least square (2SLS) model. Also, we provide validity and robustness tests of these three IVs and research funding effects. We find that our IVs serve the function of exogenizing and isolating endogeneity in capturing the research funding effect. Empirical findings show that receiving research funding increases a scholars research output and impact. While research
Computer science research spans a diverse array of topics, with scholars exploring numerous subfields. This paper examines the self-reported research interests of the top 3,260 most cited computer science authors on Google Scholar. Using the scholarly Python library, we systematically retrieved and classified their interests into predefined categories based on the Computer Science Ontology (CSO). The analysis highlights a hierarchy of primary research areas, including Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, Data Mining, and Computer Systems. Additionally, it investigates the distribution of these interests, identifying emerging trends, established fields, and areas with relatively less attention. These findings provide a current snapshot of research priorities and serve as a foundation for guiding future studies in computer science.
Unlike other academic bibliographic databases, Google Scholar intentionally operates in a way that does not maintain coverage stability: documents that stop being available to Google Scholar's crawlers are removed from the system. This can also affect Google Scholar's citation graph (citation counts can decrease). Furthermore, because Google Scholar is not transparent about its coverage, the only way to directly observe coverage loss is through regular monitorization of Google Scholar data. Because of this, few studies have empirically documented this phenomenon. This study analyses a large decrease in coverage of documents in the field of Astronomy and Astrophysics that took place in 2019 and its subsequent recovery, using longitudinal data from previous analyses and a new dataset extracted in 2020. Documents from most of the larger publishers in the field disappeared from Google Scholar despite continuing to be available on the Web, which suggests an error on Google Scholar's side. Disappeared documents did not reappear until the following index-wide update, many months after the problem was discovered. The slowness with which Google Scholar is currently able to resolve indexing
The task of scholar name disambiguation is crucial in various real-world scenarios, including bibliometric-based candidate evaluation for awards, application material anti-fraud measures, and more. Despite significant advancements, current methods face limitations due to the complexity of heterogeneous data, often necessitating extensive human intervention. This paper proposes a novel approach by leveraging search-enhanced language models across multiple languages to improve name disambiguation. By utilizing the powerful query rewriting, intent recognition, and data indexing capabilities of search engines, our method can gather richer information for distinguishing between entities and extracting profiles, resulting in a more comprehensive data dimension. Given the strong cross-language capabilities of large language models(LLMs), optimizing enhanced retrieval methods with this technology offers substantial potential for high-efficiency information retrieval and utilization. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating local languages significantly enhances disambiguation performance, particularly for scholars from diverse geographic regions. This multi-lingual, search-enhanced m
The role played by research scholars in the dissemination of scientific knowledge on social media has always been a central topic in social media metrics (altmetrics) research. Different approaches have been implemented to identify and characterize active scholars on social media platforms like Twitter. Some limitations of past approaches were their complexity and, most importantly, their reliance on licensed scientometric and altmetric data. The emergence of new open data sources like OpenAlex or Crossref Event Data provides opportunities to identify scholars on social media using only open data. This paper presents a novel and simple approach to match authors from OpenAlex with Twitter users identified in Crossref Event Data. The matching procedure is described and validated with ORCID data. The new approach matches nearly 500,000 matched scholars with their Twitter accounts with a level of high precision and moderate recall. The dataset of matched scholars is described and made openly available to the scientific community to empower more advanced studies of the interactions of research scholars on Twitter.
Citations are widely considered in scientists' evaluation. As such, scientists may be incentivized to inflate their citation counts. While previous literature has examined self-citations and citation cartels, it remains unclear whether scientists can purchase citations. Here, we compile a dataset of ~1.6 million profiles on Google Scholar to examine instances of citation fraud on the platform. We survey faculty at highly-ranked universities, and confirm that Google Scholar is widely used when evaluating scientists. Intrigued by a citation-boosting service that we unravelled during our investigation, we contacted the service while undercover as a fictional author, and managed to purchase 50 citations. These findings provide conclusive evidence that citations can be bought in bulk, and highlight the need to look beyond citation counts.
The volume of scientific output is creating an urgent need for automated tools to help scientists keep up with developments in their field. Semantic Scholar (S2) is an open data platform and website aimed at accelerating science by helping scholars discover and understand scientific literature. We combine public and proprietary data sources using state-of-the-art techniques for scholarly PDF content extraction and automatic knowledge graph construction to build the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph, the largest open scientific literature graph to-date, with 200M+ papers, 80M+ authors, 550M+ paper-authorship edges, and 2.4B+ citation edges. The graph includes advanced semantic features such as structurally parsed text, natural language summaries, and vector embeddings. In this paper, we describe the components of the S2 data processing pipeline and the associated APIs offered by the platform. We will update this living document to reflect changes as we add new data offerings and improve existing services.