Google Scholar illiteracy in the PNAS

Wow. Good report. :omg:

They are totally clueless and incompetent at using Google scholar... as you say, Google scholar illiterate.

This is just embarrassing... as you demonstrate, simple searches to attempt to reproduce their results show obvious errors. It's one thing to not know how Google scholar works if you just use it for occasional research... it's another thing completely when you are writing papers based on it and then drawing "scientific" conclusions from Google Scholar searches. It would be like if you did a paper on SEO (Search Engine Optimizaton) tactics and didn't know how search engines worked, or if you were doing opinion polls and didn't know about sample sizes and margins of error.

This simply comes down to "experts" not knowing how to use their tools. (Unless, of course, they did know how to use their tools and used the knowledge to intentionally spike the results to reach a predetermined conclusion. In which case, they committed scientific fraud.)

Is this a published and "peer reviewed" paper? (The description at the top of the paper at PNAS.org suggests that it is pending final review.) If this made it through peer review, then I don't have too much faith in the sanctity of peer review... well, peer review at PNAS, anyway.

Exactly, it is a fantastic resource for research but not for these sorts of studies.