Delete My Semantic Scholar Author Profile

In my five years of sporadic checking, Semantic Scholar has never accurately reflected my publication record.

Early on, it included articles from other Nick Walkers. This kind of thing happens. Like Google Scholar and other large scale indices, Semantic Scholar collects and munges data of various quality, and essentially has to guess how many Nick Walkers there are and how to assign papers to them. While you can tell that a paper about service robots is unlikely to come from a synthetic aperture radar expert, or a British professor of chemistry, the technology of 2019 was not up to the task. After failing to correct the issue myself with their limited tools, I eventually emailed support, and they fixed enough of the problem for me to stop trying.

The latest issue is more pernicious. In recent years I’ve had two profiles, a “verified” one which includes four publications, and another which includes the rest. This abbreviated profile is attached to the papers that show up first in most search results for my name. It’s likely that its verification is somehow a result of my flailing to fix the previous issues.

My emails to support over the past couple months haven’t led to the issue being fixed, and there is no other means of recourse. What happens when you send the email? I’m not sure, but based on my observation, support staff approve the request, then file a polite suggestion to some machine learning pipeline which proceeds to do jack all with it.

Update December 20th, 2023: The two profiles have been merged, likely as a result of internal escalation after emailing this post to the team. There remains no way to opt out of having a profile.

Update February 10th, 2025: Now there’s a new second profile (image for posterity), again with the latest crop of papers. Seven years later, still mopping AI slop.

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This harm¹ is small but familiar. A technology enables something new, something which would’ve traditionally required unimaginable human effort. The technology is pushed to its limit so it can create value. It’s only after this point—due to a lack of earlier critical evaluation²—that a litany of issues arises, issues which can only reliably be resolved with…an unimaginable amount of human effort. As Google Scholar has demonstrated, it’s simpler to create profile pages only for users who want them, as they can then be asked to help fix mistakes. But the resulting sparse graph of author profiles would make Semantic Scholar a much less valuable tool.

Any AI system empowered to publicly characterize a person must allow that person to opt out³. On every author profile, there should be a button to request the deletion of the page, something more prominent than a pointer to the legal team’s email address. I think everyone agrees that the ability to incorporate feedback is a basic⁴ and necessary feature for a product like Semantic Scholar. But the bar should be the ability to guarantee you won’t have to give feedback again.