r/AskAcademia • u/Lazy_Ad6934 • 11h ago
STEM Has anyone encountered a paper that disappeared completely after being indexed on Google Scholar? How can I find it?
Hi everyone,
I'm hoping someone can help me figure out what happened to a paper I found and cited about a year ago.
While working on the related work section of my research paper, I found a paper on Google Scholar that was directly related to my research. There weren't many closely related papers available, so I read it and included it in my references using the BibTeX citation provided by Google Scholar.
I remember that the paper looked a little suspicious, but I genuinely believed it was a real publication because I found it on Google Scholar and read it myself.
Now, my own paper has been published, and I recently tried to find that reference again. To my surprise, I can't find the paper on Google Scholar anymore. I also checked the accepted papers listed on the conference website, but the paper wasn't there. So far, I haven't been able to locate it elsewhere.
One possible way to investigate this is to check my Google search history from that period. I've already requested my Google history data, but retrieving and going through it will take some time.
Unfortunately, I'm also using a different laptop now, so I don't currently have access to the downloaded papers from my old machine.
This situation is worrying because the reference is already in my published paper. I'm concerned that the paper might have been fabricated or AI-generated, although I have no evidence to establish that this is what happened. To be clear, I did not use AI to generate this reference, I found the paper on Google Scholar and read it myself.
I want to establish what actually happened before drawing any conclusions. In the meantime, I thought it might be useful to ask the community whether others have encountered this problem and whether there are additional ways to investigate it.
Thank you for any suggestions or experiences you can share.