A simple question:

Is it my imagination, or is Google Scholar becoming worse? I'm curious, based on my own recent experiences and those of others. Here's an example of what happened to another researcher:

 

Google Scholar Completely Disappeared Our Paper With 60+ Citations
by u/simonramstedt in academia

I have been dealing with a similar problem. Granted the hidden articles or chapters involved probably don't have 60 citations (I really am not famous enough for that). I am even getting the occasional phantom citation - e.g., a situation where a recent article or chapter has been cited by an article published easily two years before being available online or in press. Right now I am drawing the conclusion that my Google Scholar profile is no longer accurate, nor is a Google Scholar search (and I'll admit I've had some lingering concerned about the quality of Google Scholar searches prior to now). It does not help that Google Scholar has no viable mechanism to contact any sort of technical support. There are no phone numbers. There is still a support email address (and thus far emails don't bounce) but it's unclear if anyone ever reads any support requests through that email address. Someone in a support community gave me a link to a Google Form that was supposed to be used (and I guess he at one time must have had some success with it), but here's the rub: that link to the form is no longer valid. Nor are support communities (which are really just the blind leading the blind) sufficient for addressing inaccuracies in Google Scholar. Let's face it: this is a Google product that was never great, but it now has become increasingly unusable to the extent that I now strongly recommend against students relying on it. 

Happy New Year and an Update on That Problematic Cyberbullying Paper

Well, 2025 has come an gone. Welcome to 2026. I am sure I will continue to offer my periodic posts as time permits. Some good news toward the end of last year was that a paper of mine was accepted for publication, and it will be published early this year. I know I rarely choose high-impact journal outlets these days and that is on purpose. I'm less interested in climbing whatever ladder we scholars are supposed to climb and more interested in getting the information out there. If it is worthwhile to someone, it will get cited. If not, that's life. The main thing is to continue to march to the beat of my own drummer. 

One thing I want to quickly circle back to is a paper I have discussed before here and here. I noticed recently that the journal that published the paper issued a corrigendum. That corrigendum featured the updated table I referred to earlier. Unfortunately, that means that the paper still has a problem or two and that is the problem I noted in my previous post: at least two of the standard deviations reported in that table apparently cannot be true (see previous post for my screenshots of some SPRITE runs), which is a meta-analyst's nightmare. I've double-checked and triple-checked those standard deviations as well as I possibly can, making the assumption that the authors used the Likert scales they reported for each DV and that each DV was a single-item measure (the authors provide no information to the contrary and there is no archived data to reference). It is possible that one or both assumptions I made are incorrect either due to typos on the part of the authors (regarding the Likert scales) or the potential of the DVs being multi-item questionnaires. However, until I am corrected, I think I will stick with my initial assessment. Something is still regrettably off about the data analyses reported in this paper and I am deeply concerned. 

If there are any new developments, I shall let you know. In the meantime, stay tuned.