Google Scholar makes it Hard - the complexity of organizing one's publications

TL;DR

This paper examines the challenges and computational complexity involved in maintaining and organizing publications on Google Scholar, highlighting issues faced by researchers in managing their profiles.

Contribution

The paper analyzes the complexity of merging publications on Google Scholar and proves that deciding whether certain subsets can be merged is NP-complete.

Findings

Merging publications across different pages is often impossible due to interface limitations.

Deciding if specific subsets of papers can be merged is an NP-complete problem.

The interface's design complicates accurate publication management for researchers.

Abstract

With Google Scholar, scientists can maintain their publications on personal profile pages, while the citations to these works are automatically collected and counted. Maintenance of publications is done manually by the researcher herself, and involves deleting erroneous ones, merging ones that are the same but which were not recognized as the same, adding forgotten co-authors, and correcting titles of papers and venues. The publications are presented on pages with 20 or 100 papers in the web page interface from 2012--2014. The interface does not allow a scientist to merge two version of a paper if they appear on different pages. This not only implies that a scientist who wants to merge certain subsets of publications will sometimes be unable to do so, but also, we show in this note that the decision problem to determine if it is possible to merge given subsets of papers is NP-complete.