A quick study of Scholar-ly Citation by Gene Golovchinsky.
From the post:
Google recently unveiled Citations, its extension to Google Scholar that helps people to organize the papers and patents they wrote and to keep track of citations to them. You can edit metadata that wasn’t parsed correctly, merge or split references, connect to co-authors’ citation pages, etc. Cool stuff. When it comes to using this tool for information seeking, however, we’re back to that ol’ Google command line. Sigh.
Gene covers use of the Citations interface in some detail and then offers suggestions and pointers to resources that could help Google create a better interface.
Can’t say whether Google will take Gene’s advice or not. If you are smart, when you are designing an interface for similar material, you will.
Or as Gene concludes:
In short, Google seems to have taken the lessons from general web search, and applied them to Google Scholar, with predictable results. Instead, they should look at Google Scholar as an opportunity to learn about HCIR, about exploratory search with long-running, evolving information needs, and to apply those lessons to the web search interface.