Is there a way to report to google scholar some systematic mistakes?

(Edit: I am no longer at Google Scholar, so I cannot fix issues for anyone anymore.)

I am an engineer on the Google Scholar team.

Errors in citation data provided by Google Scholar can occur either because of an error at the source or a case that is not handled correctly by our algorithms. We have automated monitoring systems in place to detect errors that occur widely and bring them to the attention of humans, but it is not possible to catch and fix every possible case at the scale at which we operate.

You can use our contact form to contact us but we do not provide any guarantees of responding or fixing the problem within X business days.

Regarding the paper "Heat generation in plasmonic nanostructures: Influence of morphology", we have provided the citation data as it appears at the source.

<meta name="citation_firstpage" content="153109" />

I believe for some physics journals it is standard to cite the first page only instead of a page range.

Regarding the paper "Super-resolution in high-contrast media", it is our mistake that we have classified the venue as a conference instead of a journal. Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.


The obvious place to report it would be the Google Scholar "contact us" form. I suspect there is little chance of the problems being fixed (since scholar has been around for over a decade, and I'm sure others must have reported these problems over the years) but you have little to lose by trying.


Pont is right that Google Scholar has a contact form, which is mainly useful if bugs in their own system causes mistakes. I'd hesitate to call this a mistake, however. At least not on their part, as they presumably source their data from e.g. publishers and journals. Contacting the publisher directly may be more productive.

The reason for the pages error you mention is simply that, at least in physics, you usually only include the starting page in a citation. In a list of references, I'd expect those two papers to be listed like this (or similar):

Appl. Phys. Lett. 94, 153109 (2009)

Proc. R. Soc. A 471, 20140946 (2015)

By oversight the end page then sometimes gets left out from e.g. BibTeX files. If you download the BibTeX file from the first paper from the publisher's website or from ADS it again works this way:

pages = {153109},

which, of course, is enough information to produce the above citation. As for the second paper from Royal Society, the BibTex file doesn't even contain a page reference! Still, in the PDF version and their table of contents, they give the citation with just the one number. The ADS version actually gives a range, but it's just

pages = {20140946-20140946},

(Google Scholar classifying it as a proceeding might be on them though, as the two other sources correctly identify it as an article.)

If you're using a reference style that requires including the end page you have my condolences. Otherwise, for your own sanity, I recommend accepting that "pages" sometimes just means "page information needed to produce the citation". Different databases, different publishers, different journals just aren't fully consistent with each other - especially when it comes to citation data that isn't necessarily required.