Comment on Google Scholar is Filled with Junk Science by Google vs Google Scholar

The argument is accurate, in fact. We cannot blame Google Scholar for not cleaning up the literature is aggregates, simply because there are no existent and clear quantitative criteria to determine what is “junk” from what is not. If there was, probably Google would apply this criterion. This is the downside of liberty and democracy: you have the freedom to produce any rubbish you want, and someone will always want it. I am not in the very painful process of linking the number of papers in the reference lists of a set of peer reviewed journals to assess the number of references that appear in their lists that are from journals or publishers on Beall’s lists of “predatory” journals or publishers. The results are quite simple, but astonishing, especially the trend over time (5-7 years). The paper is in fact already in peer review, and the peer reviewers asked one extremely pertinent question, which I will paraphrase here, because it links beautifully with this story on Google Scholar: would the responsibility of filtering out junk from non-junk references in a scientific paper not be one of the responsibilities of peer reviewers? My answer, well, that will have to wait until the paper is published!