CS Salad, P Pack, B Noodles, C Fajitas, R Beans (2017)

April 21, 2020 6:44 AM

A physics professor on Twitter has discovered that Google Scholar has been displaying school lunch menus in its search results, with the menu items being parsed as author lists. Additional commentary here.
posted by Cash4Lead (17 comments total)

Well I've wasted 7 years and a few tens of thousands of dollars. Could have been getting my citation count up in the kitchen...
posted by prismatic7 at 6:58 AM on April 21, 2020 [8 favorites]

BRB, changing my last name to Sticks
posted by ckape at 7:40 AM on April 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

BRB, changing my last name to Sticks

Hmmmm. I wonder if there'd be a paper in finding the optimal plausible name change in order to maximize your citations.
posted by suetanvil at 7:58 AM on April 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

i need to start citing a wider literature

starting with

"Why are My Bones So brittle?", C. Malk
posted by lalochezia at 8:09 AM on April 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

PBJ Sandwich. LOL.
posted by carter at 8:11 AM on April 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

→ I wonder if there'd be a paper in finding the optimal plausible name change in order to maximize your citations

I think the great philosopher Ibid of Anon has that one.
posted by scruss at 8:12 AM on April 21, 2020 [13 favorites]

Dogs, MC
posted by sjswitzer at 8:57 AM on April 21, 2020

Hey now. The School Lunch series was truly foundational work in the field of elementary and middle school education. The lesser known but equally important supplementary work of the School Breakfast group made significant advances in the area of equity and access to basic education for students from low-income families.
posted by eviemath at 9:09 AM on April 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

Tag yourself, I'm C.C. Nuggets
posted by mhum at 9:11 AM on April 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

I think it's fantastic that this important work is finally getting the recognition it deserves for its contributions to human knowledge. I recognize that there have been a number of controversies with the work over the years, of course. Allegations of corporate influence on the selection of research topics or methodology, particularly from the dairy and meat industries. The highly controversial extensive use of sugar in their methodologies. Sexism in lab groups. Etc.
posted by eviemath at 9:14 AM on April 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

Looks like Tim Finin solved it:

"Wow, there are many instances of these! It looks like some get pulled into Google Scholar because the lunch menus are cited by papers discussing nutrition."
posted by sjswitzer at 9:16 AM on April 21, 2020 [10 favorites]

This has massive implications for calculation of Erdős–Bacon numbers.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:22 AM on April 21, 2020 [13 favorites]

Searching for "tater tot" finds lots of referenced "papers". Most of those are school newspapers though, including a lot from iastate.edu.
posted by alikins at 9:26 AM on April 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

Meanwhile, the work of K. Kat, B. Finger, and W. McCallit remains locked up behind paywalls, accessible only to institutions with larger allowances.
posted by PlusDistance at 11:27 AM on April 21, 2020 [7 favorites]

I love you guys.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:31 PM on April 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

lol
posted by Mrs Potato at 1:57 AM on April 22, 2020

"Please select all the tiles that contain peer-reviewed papers on the subject of automatic document identification and classification. Click done when none remain."
posted by swr at 5:04 AM on April 22, 2020 [2 favorites]