How Google Scholar transformed research - Impact of Social Sciences

"In a new study, I examine how the rate of citations of older papers published in the 1950s and 1960s changed after 2004, when Google Scholar was launched. While researchers have identified problems with Google Scholar since its launch, online traffic data indicates there was rapid acceptance of the platform.

To provide convincing evidence that any change that occurred after 2004 was not due to other factors such as the increased volume of papers or events influencing citation behaviour, I carefully matched pre-citation patterns of these older papers with newer published ones. The citations of a paper usually follow an inverse U-shaped relationship, with few citations immediately after publication, followed by a spike and then a drop off. To examine whether results are sensitive to such citation lags, I separately matched papers published in the early and late 1980s.

I tested whether Google Scholar indeed favours new knowledge at the expense of old knowledge. On the contrary, in a simple numerical analysis, I found that older papers are represented on par with their overall frequency in the universe of science, which is in line with previous research findings...."