Google Books, Scopus, Microsoft Academic and Mendeley for impact assessment of doctoral dissertations: A multidisciplinary analysis of the UK

Abstract

A research doctorate normally culminates in publishing a dissertation reporting a substantial body of novel work. In the absence of a suitable citation index, this article explores the relative merits of alternative methods for the large-scale assessment of dissertation impact, using 150,740 UK doctoral dissertations from 2009–2018. Systematic methods for this were designed for Google Books, Scopus, Microsoft Academic, and Mendeley. Less than 1 in 8 UK doctoral dissertations had at least one Scopus (12%), Microsoft Academic (11%), or Google Books citation (9%), or at least one Mendeley reader (5%). These percentages varied substantially by subject area and publication year. Google Books citations were more common in the Arts and Humanities (18%), whereas Scopus and Microsoft Academic citations were more numerous in Engineering (24%). In the Social Sciences, Google Books (13%) and Scopus (12%) citations were important and in Medical Sciences, Scopus and Microsoft Academic citations to dissertations were rare (6%). Few dissertations had Mendeley readers (from 3% in Science to 8% in the Social Sciences) and further analysis suggests that Google Scholar finds more citations, but does not report information about all dissertations within a repository and is not a practical tool for large-scale impact assessment

Revealing the research landscape of Master's degrees via bibliometric analyses

“…Regarding the dynamics of production, a total of 143 dissertations were completed during the observation window. The average number of citations per document is relatively low (0.24 cites/document), compared to slightly higher averages found in the field of engineering [30,31]. The number of keywords per document is around 3.4 (486/143), a typical value.…”

Patterns of dissertation dissemination: publication-based outcomes of doctoral theses in the social sciences

“…We provided the analysis on combined Scopus and Google Books citations in line with the pre-specified empirical strategy above, being interested in whether monographic dissertations receive more citations. Finally, we manually collected Google Scholar citations, which have been used before to estimate the scholarly impact of dissertations (Kousha & Thelwall, 2020), and applied the above empirical strategy to assess if the results also hold for Google Scholar citations.…”

“…Despite this, compared to journal publications, the citation rate of dissertations in the scientific literature has declined over time (Larivière et al, 2008). Less than 12% of the dissertations produced by UK doctoral candidates have at least one citation on platforms like Scopus, Microsoft Academic, or Google Books (Kousha & Thelwall, 2020).…”