Keith Fraser,
As I read it, it suggests that the publications will be sorted after those criteria in the search results, not that the supposedly poor papers won’t be shown at all.
Why have such a search engine when there is normal Google? Well, because normal Google will list 99% non-papers if you enter the same key word, and of course they take up the 20,000 highest ranking hits because they have many more visitors than specialist journal websites.
Again, GS serves a useful purpose. If I use Web of Science for example I only get the publications that have enough articles per year to be eligible and happen to already have been included. Taxonomic monograph series don’t qualify, so an entire class of publications in my area is missing from that database. Similar problems for many other indexing services.
An important point to keep in mind is that I am a qualified career scientist, so I can take GS search results and judge for myself whether a publication makes sense. (Interestingly this blog is generally written under the assumption that readers of scientific papers do not have such an ability, and, even more puzzlingly, that professional scientists do not have any ability whatsoever to distinguish between serious and predatory journals.) And of course I have to make the same judgement call with PNAS or Systematic Biology, because even if they won’t publish anything about a Martian civilisation flawed papers still slip through peer review from time to time.
Jeffrey Beall,
Anger and exasperation are different emotions.
I am totally with you on the problematic incentive structure of open access publishing and the tediousness of science spam. One may wonder, however, if you are helping your case by strongly implying that in a perfect world a search engine for papers would not be allowed to exist at all.
There is an obvious trade-off between getting all the good stuff and a lot of nonsense on the one side (GS) and getting less nonsense but also missing out on a lot of the good stuff on the other (indexing services). Sometimes you need the first, sometimes you want the latter.
Do you really prefer a situation in which people have no realistic chance of finding a monograph from the Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden series or a paper in the Western Australian State Herbarium’s peer-reviewed taxonomy journal Nuytsia unless they know of their existence in advance and browse every such journal homepage individually? Should “A new species of Angianthus from the south-west of Western Australia” be actively hidden from somebody searching for papers on Angianthus because Nuytsia isn’t in the JCR? That would seem less than ideal to me.