We’ve all read excellent law review articles that were published in journals of relatively low prestige, and utterly crapulous ones that graced the pages of most highly regarded ones. Online legal research services such as Lexis and Westlaw facilitate the discovery, if not the use, of potentially useful law review articles regardless of where they were placed, because they return search results by subject matter relevancy, and order them alphabetically.
Not so Google Scholar, apparently. From the Official Google Blog we learn:
Today we’re launching a feature of Google Scholar which will make it easier for researchers to keep up with recent research. … It’s not just a plain sort by date, but rather we try to rank recent papers the way researchers do, by looking at the prominence of the author’s and journal’s previous papers, how many citations it already has, when it was written, and so on.
So the legal scholarship that receives the most citations will be easiest to find, and works with fewer citations will now get pushed to the bottom of the Google Scholar search returns. Lather, rise, repeat.
