As a researcher, what are some things that you find annoying when searching the scientific literature? What could be improved?

@georgios I often have to dig deep through a lot of irrelevant articles even when trying to exclude certain terms. Though the big providers (WoS, Scopus, ... Google Scholar) claim "relevance", their idea is often very different from mine as to what that means. Some topics easily mask less popular ones [and maybe it is often me who is the problem?]. Often, I still go through long lists of possible references --- as 20 years ago, only the lists got longer now.

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@the_passivist thank you for the reply! It's really annoying that to perform basic searches that we have to repeat daily we have to go through thousands of results right?

@georgios What I'm really missing is the option to "cluster" results. Example: Often I look for physical interpretation papers on certain spectra. Then I find a lot of papers that used the technique and are synthesis or application papers. Digging out the right ones that help interpreting is often a mess and lot of work. (Other examples exist). One would believe that in the age of machine learning, we could at least get some help from the machine to that end. Challenge for people like you :-)

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