Original article (in Serbian) was published on 27/09/2022
Physicist Milovan Suvakov informed us via Twitter about the text and a TV report by N1 in which it is stated that the representative of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) Marko Atlagic, who was recently elected as the chairman of the parliamentary committee for education, “is not recognized by Google”, that is, by searching Google Scholar his scientific works cannot be found.
“The statement in the title of this text is incorrect, which can be checked with one click. I assume that the mistake was made by using the interlocutor’s quote from the text for the title, without checking the accuracy. I don’t understand why there is a need to present untruths in addition to all the other facts that support the fact that he is a bad candidate for this position. I hope it was an unintentional mistake”, Suvakov wrote.
Two search models
SNS MP Marko Atlagic was recently elected president of the parliamentary Committee for Education, Science, Technological Development and Information Society. In this regard, TV N1 prepared a report on the scientific background of Atlagic. One of the interlocutors, university professor Vladimir Obradovic, states that “in this most famous and widely used database, Google Scholar, there are no records at all, that is, there is no information about Mr. Atlagic” and he gives an example of a search by author in which Marko Atlagić is not found.
The interlocutor of N1, Professor Vladimir Obradovic, is right when he says that Atlagic is not in the results if we search Google Scholar through the author’s profile. Still, it is not true that he is not there at all since a simple search gives results.
If “Marko Atlagic” is typed into the standard Google Scholar search without additional filtering, 34 of his works and two books can be found in the results. In Atlagic’s biography available on the website Otvoreniparlament.rs, it is stated that he wrote eight books and over 150 scientific papers, and FakeNews Tragac sent an email to the representative of SNS with a request to see the list of scientific papers, but we did not receive a reply.
On the other hand, we successfully contacted Professor Vladimir Obradovic, who responded to the statement that Atlagic can still be found on Google with “both yes and no”, since – according to him – such a search is not the best, and Google Scholar itself does not represent a scientific database as credible as Scopus in which he found one of Atlagic’s works, and that too uncited.
In addition to the web portal and television N1, this news was also reported by the web portal Direktno.
Atlagic’s works on Google Scholar
Most of the works listed by Google Scholar were published in the Proceedings of the Faculty of Philosophy in Pristina and the magazine “Bastina” where Atlagic is a member of the editorial board. The largest number of papers is, therefore, from journals that currently belong to category M23, which is in the Journal Citation Reports database, but according to the achieved impact factor, it is not ranked among the first 60% of journals in its scientific field. The following are articles from magazines that currently belong to the M24 category, which are national magazines of international importance. You can find more detailed information about these categorisations here.
The editors of FN Tragac made a list of all Marko Atlagic’s works available on Google Scholar, and you can download the list here. The categories of the journal are listed according to the current categorisation and do not necessarily reflect the journal’s rank at the time the paper was published.
The list includes papers in which an extremely biased and even unscientific discourse can be observed even by a cursory inspection of the titles, summaries and text. The articles “Yugoslavia did not fall apart – it was deliberately broken up” and “The massacre in Srebrenica in 1995 is the greatest triumph of propaganda” were written by Atlagic in co-authorship with his party colleague Aleksandar Martinovic, and the second paper begins with a paragraph that is an illustrative example of observations that do not fit the scientific functional style and academic standard:
“Among the Serbs, there is a certain number of honest and brave Serbian historians for whom scientific truth is above all else, and who will certainly not bow down under the attack of the largest countries of the West, when it comes to scientific truth, and who will at all costs debunk the war lies and subterfuges imposed by USA and other Western powers”.
The question of the quality of Atlagic’s works would require a separate analysis, but when it comes to quantity and visibility – as pointed out by Milovan Suvakov – there is no doubt that Marko Atlagic is present on Google’s service for scientific works.