As Google Scholar continues its growth in coverage and popularity for searching for scholarly articles, the scale and significance of this database is influencing the way that the ranking of researchers and the impact of their research is being measured.

In the article Google Scholar duped and deduped - the aura of "robometrics", Peter Jacso investigates the potential for a distortion of content and citation. This article reports on research in which authors were able to deliberately manipulate their own ranking, and another case where a fictional author was created and the Google Scholar system was manipulated to the point that the author achieved the second highest h-index within the discipline of computer science.

The lack of human intervention, which facilitates its incredible size, is also a considerable weakness in its reliability. Jacso argues that the software running Google Scholar "still cannot collect data, nor can it do Boolean operations correctly, identify data elements appropriately, count well, organise, sort and present the results in an easy to interpret format. Journal and author names cannot be browsed."

Péter, Jacsó 2011, 'Google Scholar duped and deduped - the aura of "robometrics"', Online Information Review, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 154-60.