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Look, this is not really a fight I'm interested in having, but in my opinion Google Scholar is shit and I never use it for anything because it is shit and I don't know anyone who does use it for anything because it is shit. To my mind, by far the most useful academic tool to appear in the last, I'm going to say 20 years, is just Archive.org's online library. Probably some people love Google Scholar so this is just me having thoughts about a thing, but I haven't got any other response for you here. I've never seen anyone try to prove anything of worth by citing to "Google Scholar says" so I'm just kind of dumbfounded about it. Maybe I am just old, that is often a problem when matters of technology come into play, but there you have it. Google's front page search is orders of magnitude more valuable to my scholarship than Google Scholar has ever been.
But I don't do STEM, so, you know. YMMV.
See, this is where you misread me so completely I have to wonder about my communication skills. It's very much the sloppy quotation practices, for me. It's very much the bad scholarship that I hate. The weird culture war stuff is bad, too, but it might be helpful for me to suggest that when I refer to these scholars as my "outgoup," I am about 60% thinking about the fact that they work in colleges of education, rather than thinking about their political alignment qua outgroup. That is, these are education scholars, often with Ed.Ds, while I'm a philosopher who sometimes writes analytically on education.
It's hard to not launch into a rant about this, honestly. And it feels like a failure of professional courtesy to be like, "oh, those teaching academics are the worst" when I'm sure the engineers or the business professors or someone feels the same about me. But the scholarship that comes out of these colleges of education, like, it's just so bad, basically all the time. And it happens to have kind of played havoc on my day, today, and I thought others might find it interesting to see a specific case, about specific people, making a specific mistake, that is kind of emblematic of the larger criticisms leveled against them.
Google scholar is great! It frequently provides a link to a pdf in some foreign university professor's home directory for a paper that Elsevier wants $35 for!
Oh you meant in terms of the paper quality in search results. In my experience it's fine if you know what you're looking for and what you're looking for is a field of research that actually exists. If you are affiliated with a university it's probably much less valuable though.
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I am sure it is incomplete. Nevertheless, if this specific phenomenon were at all common in the academic literature, more than 2 hits would show up. For example, when I search for Freire pedagogy, I get 385,000 hits.
You made a claim about academic malfeasance without any evidence apart from one person. When I pointed out that the most widely avaliable source of academic publications contains no evidence of others misusing the quote, I would think that someone whose primarily concern is intellectual integrity would either 1) demonstrate that other, more complete, sources include many examples; or 2) concede that perhaps he or she misspoke when referring to academic malfeasance? Can you see that your failure to do either might lead one to infer that you are less concerned with calling out sloppy quotation practices in principle than you are with denigrating your outgroup? Especially given that you posted your comment not on a culture war forum, and your one example of bad practices just so happened to be by an outgroup member?
I'm done talking to you. Either you didn't read my post, or you didn't understand it, or you're flat-out trolling (which I often suspect you of doing, but I try to pretend that's not the most likely explanation for most of your participation here). I gave you a list of several people who did the same thing, I linked multiple examples including books from academic presses, and then I repeated that list to you when you ignored it the first time.
"Oh but Google Scholar only has two examples" is a non sequitur in that context.
Well, I apologize for not going back and looking at every one of your links to see who published them, but I am afraid that you are the one who is trolling. Because if you weren't, and instead were acting in good faith, when I said that you don't have any academic examples, you would have pointed to the books from academic presses, instead of simply denigrating Google Scholar.
And, your post linked to four books: Anti-Racism in Higher Education: An Action Guide for Change (published by Policy Press); Reframing Assessment to Center Equity: Theories, Models, and Practices (published by Stylus Publishing); Developing and Evaluating Quality Bilingual Practices in Higher Education (published by Multilingual Matters); and White Reign : Deploying Whiteness in America (published by St. Martin’s Press). None of those is self-evidently an academic press. St. Martin's certainly isn't. So, again, someone arguing in good faith would have said, "note that the books I cited are by academic presses; for example, Stylus Publishing is owned by Big State University Press." But, you didn't do that.
Let me just google these:
Policy Press seems to be attached to Bristol University.
Stylus Publishing doesn't offhand have an association with any university, though they certainly depict themselves as a university publisher.
Multilingual Matters "is an independent academic book publisher based in Bristol, UK"
And St. Martins just seems to be a freeform publisher.
So depending on qualification, this is either 0/4, 1/4 or 3/4. What do you consider an "academic press"?
As I said, "None of those is self-evidently an academic press." That's the point: He is upset that I said he did not provide evidence for his claim of "academic malfeasance" nor "shitty scholarship" because he linked to a couple of books that are published by what are arguably academic presses, but his initial links were to Amazon pages. so in order to figure that out, you need to 1) scroll down to find out who the publisher is; and 2) google them.
And, let's not lose sight of the larger picture: If the misuse of this quote was indeed common "academic malfeasance", it would indeed show up more than a handful of times in a Google Scholar search. He is making an inflammatory claim about his outgroup, based on almost no evidence.
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lol what the fuck
Don't post low effort, contentless comments like this.
Tell Gdanning that, please. Most of his posts lately seem to be nothing but a lot of words to say "I didn't read the post I'm replying to". It's obnoxious and infuriating and hard to believe it could be in good faith and I can't judge anyone too harshly for this kind of reaction. Just because it's superficially more polite (although even that gets borderline at times!) doesn't make it higher quality.
No. If I see Gdanning actually breaking any rules, I will mod him, but "Makes bad arguments that piss me off" is not against the rules.
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I thought it was perfectly clear. I would put the onus on the other party in this case on being unreasonably obtuse.
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How do you find archive.org vs google books? I mostly just use the latter. Does it have shortcomings?
I usually have to search for books directly at archive.org (but the same is often true of Google Books, with the difference that Google Books will then often tell me I can't see more than a preview). But archive.org will search text as well as metadata, and the interface is quite lovely. The primary shortcoming is limitations being imposed by copyright law.
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