Does google scholar give personalized results?

They should get the same results.

Really, @janbb? I guess it works differently from regular Google?

Maybe post some sample search terms and see if you can get someone to do the same search at the same time, to compare results and find out?

It would probably help if the people in question were somehow different in a way that might tend to affect the results, like being from different countries, having different interests, different shopping habits, and of course, different political leanings, about a political search.

I don’t know about Google Scholar at all, but I can tell you that my husband, right across the hall from me, with the same IP address and using the same browser, got different Google search results from mine using the same search terms.

Google’s secret algorithms are good at tailoring “relevant” results to the individual user. This is, I’ve read, one reason why people tend to find information that confirms what they already think and groups that reinforce their own attitudes—rather than the idealized global mixing of views that people thought the internet would facilitate.

I would hope a scholarly tool would work differently, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I doubt that there is even any one person who knows all the subtleties and complexities of Google search engines.

Yes, it does. Try google scholar ing it.

@Jeruba I don’t have extensive experience with Google Scholar as I do with other academic databases but as an academic database with a fixed, if expanding, data set of curated articles, it should return the same results when queried the same way at the same time. I would not expect it to be looking at your browsing history or ad preferences. Otherwise, how would scholars be able to verify each other’s work? It’s like the old walled garden analogy they used to use to describe portals like AOL.

I can’t say for sure but I’m sure there are Googlers who do know the answer.

It looks like it does, at least a little: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316634694_Google_Scholar%27s_Filter_Bubble_An_Inflated_Actuality. The researchers note that the “filter bubble” effect in google scholar seems very small, but I emphasize that they did find such an effect.

There are about 999999…9999999 more important things in the world, but it makes me mad that I can’t easily “turn off the filter bubble” when searching such a curated dataset. Hmmphgrumblegrumble

But:

“The Jaccard similarity of search results for all nine keywords is strikingly high, with only one keyword that exhibits a localized bubble at 95% level. This chapter therefore concludes that the filter bubble phenomenon does not warrant concern.”

So yes, but it is pretty small.