Add Google Scholar as a Firefox search engine

I've already had the same problem.

Here's a python code for dealing with that: https://github.com/WittmannF/sort-google-scholar

My suggestion is that you rank by citations/year rather than the absolute number of citations (usually older articles are more cited).

It had been gone in redesign few months before you asked this question and most probably you had enough time to assure yourself it won't return ever.

One mitigation would be adding those keywords from topic to search query text. The other could be limiting search down to particular publishing site with site:example.com/path stem, if you know that info in advance.