This is why for years I’ve discouraged undergraduates (or discouraged their professors from encouraging them) from using Google Scholar in lieu of subscription databases. It takes experience to know how to differentiate scholarly articles from other content that ends up in your search results.

April 03, 2026 - 13:11 UTC

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In my field, we are lucky to have (free- tax payer subsidized) Pubmed- if not there, it’s not scholarship ; if it is there… well you still have to check the journal and overall quality, especially now with all predatory journals
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I am old enough to remember when we discouraged wilkipedia… which is probably the best thing around now for general information
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If signed in through the institution, google scholar helpfully adds a ‘find it @[institution]’ tag on all papers that have been curated by our librarians - it’s a great way to demonstrate quality variation to students and filter for reputable journals.
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True! But most people don’t do that (no matter how much we promote the option), because it does require going through the library’s website. Also, while it may indicate the paper is coming from a more reliable publisher, there’s no option to actually filter. You’re still shown all of the results.
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Even more so now when people use AI to help them "write." Yesterday, I found a "review" paper that was absolute gibberish. Like someone searched for relevant articles and pasted their abstracts together, unedited. That's one (allegedly) "peer-reviewed" journal for my permanent ignore list.
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Claude (the one l tried) cannot deal with citations - it will admit so; and it cannot (yet?) make sense of my subfield well— too many acronyms for things that may be found in the same text, small mechanistic differences have big impact on outcomes. It will correct itself if you question it…
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