Maybe you shouldn't; or rather, maybe you should be more careful about how you use it.
One of the things I do when I'm not dodging Nazis or hunting down lost holy relics (possibly not wholly true) is edit a reasonably well-regarded peer-reviewed academic journal (entirely true).
Like many academic journals, one of the challenges we face is the increasingly common requirement by funding bodies that that research should be published via some form of open access - ie, made freely available to just about everyone on the internet instead of published in a print academic journal, however prestigious, available only to subscribers or in libraries.
Fortunately, my journal's publishers have managed to find a way to meet both the open access requirement and the prestige of established print journal titles. I won't bore you with the details here (though I can outline them if anyone asks), but it's a fairly neat and simple solution.
The open access demands have led to an extraordinary rise in the number of predatory online open access journals that are little more than scams - often offering to publish your research on receipt of a fee paid to a bank account in India. Sometimes the results are hilarious, such as when the so-called International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology accepted a submission called Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List.
Sometimes the results are more problematic - such as when a reputable researcher is named as the 'lead editor' or 'advisory panel member' of a so-called journal he or she hasn't even heard of.
An additional problem here is that Google Scholar doesn't distinguish between articles published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal and those published on predatory junk spam sites:
Google Scholar aims to be comprehensive, indexing articles from as many scholarly appearing journals as possible. On the surface, that goal seems noble, but a closer look reveals a major flaw in the strategy.
Because predatory publishers perform a fake or non-existent peer review, they have polluted the global scientific record with pseudo-science, a record that Google Scholar dutifully and perhaps blindly includes in its central index. Most predatory journals are included in Google Scholar. The database does not sufficiently screen for quality, in my opinion.
Google Scholar works well for known-item searches, for example, when you quickly need to locate a known article or a paper by a known author.
It performs poorly, on the other hand, at finding an article on a specific topic. It doesn’t use controlled vocabularies and includes junk science in its index. If you aren’t an expert, you are unable to separate out the junk science from the authentic science, and both are included one after another in Google Scholar search results. For those seeking the top scholarly literature on a given subject, the best resource is a focused, high-quality, curated database licensed by a library.
http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/11/04/googl ... #more-4371
The problem impacts both the sciences and the humanities; the result is that you can no longer trust Google Scholar to provide you with reputable results if you're searching for citations on a specific topic. It still has its uses if you're searching for articles by a specific author (or, erm, looking for other people's citations of your own work when compiling impact reports), but probably shouldn't be used for topic-specific searches.
Or maybe I'm overestimating the extent to which students today use Google Scholar - do any of you use it? If so, were you aware of the problems?
Or are you all wandering around with cybernetic implants these days? I don't think you are.... essay quality hasn't noticeably improved over the last decade.
