Vrftsjtryk

In disciplines such as computer science and engineering, Google Scholar is a fundamental tool in not only searching for recent work of a researcher but is also frequently used as a metric for the proficiency of the researcher.

I've noticed in many other fields, e.g. political science, or even math, Google Scholar is not nearly as popular.

Does anyone have any insight into why this is the case? Do these other fields have other tools they use to follow researchers or measure their output? Perhaps these factors are not as important in these other fields?

Math already has an excellent tool, MathSciNet. And, more importantly, MathSciNet is much more accurate than Google Scholar.

If you are a mathematician, look up yourself in both places and compare!

In computing science, papers are reviewed rather quickly (because they are often tied to conferences, with deadlines, and without journal backlog). They are also usually indexable.

In biblical studies, to give another example, it can easily take over two years from submission to publication, even with a minor revisions review shortly after submission - just because journals have a large backlog. Also, there still are journals without digital edition. Biblical scholars I know rely on mailing lists for tables of contents and find PDFs of articles they want to read on academia.edu. Google Scholar simply does not index everything and is not fast enough.

From what I've heard, in math it's the review cycle that takes long. This is different from a journal backlog, but the result is the same. Arxiv will be more up to date than Google Scholar.

There is no single answer to this question. Every field is unique. There is also an element of randomness: If a handful of the right people create Google Scholar profiles, others will follow and adoption will rapidly spread. However, I think there are two key factors:

1. 
   Willingness to adopt new technology. This depends on the existing alternatives (e.g., MathSciNet) and also how tech-savvy people are. I've noticed that, even at the individual level, there is a strong correlation between having a good, up-to-date website and having a Google Scholar profile.


2. 
   Publishing attitudes. Google Scholar is very inclusive in indexing. It counts citations from arxiv preprints, not just peer-reviewed journals. I even get citations from lecture notes and research statements that people have uploaded to their websites. Different fields have different attitudes about what should "count" as a citation and that will affect how they view Google Scholar. For example, math is much more conservative than computer science and Google Scholar adoption reflects that.

A final note specific to computer science: Just about every computer science researcher knows people (e.g. former students) who now work at Google. And Google also produces a lot of computer science research. Thus computer science has a very positive view of Google, which may not be the case in other fields.

"Time to market" of the paper (e.g., shorter review time) as Keelan noted might be a reason.

It might be also related to what is indexed by google scholar vs. more official indexes. (see link below). For example, google scholar counts as a citation basically everything that looks like a citation, regardless of whether it was peer-reviewed or not. It is possible, that some fields are more reluctant adopting such metrics. For example, arXiv platform has been long ago a popular in math field. But those papers are not peer-reviewed, at least for posting them, there is no requirement of peer-review. In other domains (I think biology) preprints have become popular more recently.

Another reason: in CS there are a lot of people outside academia. They are interested whether someone relevant cited their paper (or whatever it was). This boosts google scholar use. In many other fields researchers work only in academia. the official representatives might tend to rely more on official indices (e.g., for promotion etc).

It is also possible that some fields are more conservative than others. CS is in general a relatively young field. Also, it is more natural for CS to adopt new technologies. But think about philosophy field that has longer traditions. People in such fields also less care about technological innovations.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239314956_Citation_Analysis_Comparison_of_Web_of_ScienceR_Scopus_SciFinderR_and_Google_Scholar

Probably there are more computer-illiterate people in these fields.