Google Scholar – Platforming the scholarly economy

Google Scholar has become an important player in the scholarly economy. Whereas typical academic publishers sell bibliometrics, analytics and ranking products, Alphabet, through Google Scholar, provides “free” tools for academic search and scholarly evaluation that have made it central to academic p...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jake Goldenfein, Daniel Griffin
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society 2022-09-01
Series:Internet Policy Review
Subjects:
Online Access:https://policyreview.info/node/1671
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Google Scholar has become an important player in the scholarly economy. Whereas typical academic publishers sell bibliometrics, analytics and ranking products, Alphabet, through Google Scholar, provides “free” tools for academic search and scholarly evaluation that have made it central to academic practice. Leveraging political imperatives for open access publishing, Google Scholar has managed to intermediate data flows between researchers, research managers and repositories, and built its system of citation counting into a unit of value that coordinates the scholarly economy. At the same time, Google Scholar’s user-friendly but opaque tools undermine certain academic norms, especially around academic autonomy and the academy’s capacity to understand how it evaluates itself.
ISSN:2197-6775