With Google search results having been awful for some time now, I have to assume that Google Scholar results are also less satisfactory.
While I'm old enough to have been in undergrad before the WWW, I wasn't in grad school before the 21st c. For those of you old enough, how were you doing literature review of journal articles back in ye olde days? @academicchatter#Science#AcademicChatter#Library
@ml@academicchatter First with paper indices, MLA, etc. and standard annual bibliographies in my field/specific areas, then the last year of my diss writing Jstor and Project Muse helped a lot, most useful tool was citations in good articles, second most useful were tips from faculty & peers. My original chair was useless; senior faculty who stepped in at the end was a gem
@ml I'm not really old enough, but I find a combination Pubmed (for biomedical literature), dblp (for computer science), arXiv and occasionally biorXiv usually quite sufficient @academicchatter
Ye old days involved card catalogs & knowing the general Dewey Decimal code for what you wanted, then checking out surrounding shelves for related books. For journal articles, you would find a relevant paper (usually from someone more senior in the lab) & then look up the referenced papers. Once you got the referenced papers, you would repeat the process.
Then we got Agricola & PubMed and could search directly for relevant papers.🎉
@ml@academicchatter Waaay back in my undergrad—mid/late 1990s—I remember using the paper versions of the MLA (Modern Language Association) Bibliography to learn what had been published on different literature-related topics. That, and occasionally daisy-chaining from a good article's bibliography to the things it cited, if it was a more interdisciplinary work that wasn't included in the MLA Bib.
Not sure how it would have been done in the sciences, or what would be an effective approach now.
I recently heard (I think it was) @davecormier say that this sort of accidental building of contextual perspective while doing research processes was a huge, unfortunately now un-acknowledged benefit of The Olden Ways.
@ryanrandall@ml@academicchatter@davecormier I quite enjoy using Connected Papers for this, though I agree that indexing has become a little fraught e.g. with Frontiers / MDPI / predatory journals flooding the space... but that's unfortunately more a function of the replication crisis than the changing bibliography technology
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