I saw a writeup of a journal article just a few months ago about how there is a lot of randomness in how academic grants are distributed. They basically created several different panels of the people who write the grants and gave them each the same proposals to review, and there was an enormous variance between the proposals each panel funded. I think this was for NSF grants, but I'm not sure. Anyway I can't for the life of me find either the writeup or the journal article.
Similarly, I heard a story on NPR about a research study that found the best predictor of how much 8th graders would earn as adults wasn't race, gender, IQ, grades, or anything else like that, but rather was how much they thought they would earn as adults. Can't for the life of me find that one either.
In fact there is an entire field of research that's disappeared. I know for a fact that there is a field that's basically scientists researching scientists/science, but I can't find more than a couple of the papers in this field or even the appropriate wikipedia articles.
Have you tried a Google Scholar search? That's what it's tailor-made for; I remember it having a few search quality issues when I was in college, but if I was looking for academic work, that was the first place I'd go.
AFAIK Scholar also doesn't push more often than once every couple of years, so you can be fairly sure it wasn't broken by a recent ranking change, and what you see now is what you would've gotten in 2005, modulo additional articles published.
Similarly, I heard a story on NPR about a research study that found the best predictor of how much 8th graders would earn as adults wasn't race, gender, IQ, grades, or anything else like that, but rather was how much they thought they would earn as adults. Can't for the life of me find that one either.
In fact there is an entire field of research that's disappeared. I know for a fact that there is a field that's basically scientists researching scientists/science, but I can't find more than a couple of the papers in this field or even the appropriate wikipedia articles.