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be used (and I guess he at one time must have had some success with it), but here's the rub: that link to the form is no longer valid.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.
