A new look at evidence of scholarly citation in citation indexes and from web sources

Abstract

A sample of 1,483 publications, representative of the scholarly production of LIS faculty, was searched in Web of Science (WoS), Google, and Google Scholar. The median number of citations found through WoS was zero for all types of publications except book chapters; the median for Google Scholar ranged from 1 for print/subscription journal articles to 3 for books and book chapters. For Google the median number of citations ranged from 9 for conference papers to 41 for books. A sample of the web citations was examined and classified as representing intellectual or non-intellectual impact. Almost 92% of the citations identified through Google Scholar represented intellectual impact-primarily citations from journal articles. Bibliographic services (non-intellectual impact) were the largest single contributor of citations identified through Google. Open access journal articles attracted more web citations but the citations to print/subscription journal articles more often represented intellectual impact. In spite of problems with Google Scholar, it has the potential to provide useful data for research evaluation, especially in a field where rapid and fine-grained analysis is desirable.

Citation counting, citation ranking, and h‐index of human‐computer interaction researchers: A comparison of Scopus and Web of Science

“…Noruzi (2005) studied the citation counts in Google Scholar and Web of Science of 36 webometrics papers; in most cases, he found that Google Scholar provided higher citation counts than Web of Science. These findings were corroborated by the results of Vaughan and Shaw (2008) for information science. Bakkalbasi, Bauer, Glover, and Wang (2006) compared citation counts for articles from 11 oncology journals and 11 condensed matter physics journals published in 1993 and 2003.…”

Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science: a longitudinal and cross-disciplinary comparison

“…However, even four years after its introduction, Vaughan and Shaw (2008) found that 92% of Google Scholar citations in the field of library and information science represented what they called "intellectual impact", and that most citations came from journal articles. In the largest published verification project to date, the London School of Economics project on impact in the Social Sciences (2011), Google Scholar citations were collated for all traceable publications of a sample of 120 academics spread across five social science disciplines.…”

Journal impact evaluation: a webometric perspective

“…Many researchers have employed an implicit type of web citation by using Google Scholar to calculate citation counts to articles (Jascó, 2005;Mayr & Walter, 2007;Meho & Yang, 2007;Vaughan & Shaw, 2008). The results correlate significantly with Web of Science citations (Kousha & Thelwall, 2007) and incorporate a range of source documents, including, but not limited to, publishers' digital libraries.…”