Google Scholar citations and Google Web/URL citations: A multi‐discipline exploratory analysis

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a new data gathering method "Web/URL Citation" and use it and Google Scholar as a basis to compare traditional and Web-based citation patterns across multiple disciplines. For this, we built a sample of 1,650 articles from 108 Open Access (OA) journals published in 2001 in four science and four social science disciplines. We recorded the number of citations to the sample articles using several methods based upon the ISI Web of Science, Google Scholar and the Google search engine (Web/URL citations). For each discipline, we found significant correlations between ISI citations and both Google Scholar and Google Web/URL citations; with similar results when using total or average citations, and when comparing within and across (most) journals. We also investigated disciplinary differences. Google Scholar citations were more numerous than ISI citations in our four social science disciplines as well as in computer science, suggesting that Google Scholar is a more comprehensive tool for citation tracking in the social sciences and perhaps also in fast-moving fields where conference papers are highly valued and published online. The results for Web/URL citations suggested that counting a maximum of one hit per site produces a better measure for assessing the impact of OA journals or articles, because replicated web citations are very common within individual sites. The results can be considered as additional evidence that there is some commonality between traditional and Web-extracted citations.

Journal impact evaluation: a webometric perspective

“…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. This is effectively a hybrid web/journal database source, but seems to be heavily focused on academic sources and does not permit automatic searching in a way that would be necessary for automatic IF calculations for journals, unless provided by Google.…”

“…Web citations for articles in individual journals, as described above, have been shown to correlate significantly with traditional Web of Science citations for many disciplines (Kousha & Thelwall, 2007;Vaughan & Shaw, 2003. A web citation -hyperlink hybrid measure, URL citations, has also been shown to correlate significantly with citations (Kousha & Thelwall, 2007).…”

“…A web citation -hyperlink hybrid measure, URL citations, has also been shown to correlate significantly with citations (Kousha & Thelwall, 2007). Some studies have gone further and only counted web citations from specific types of documents, such as online presentations , online syllabuses , digitised books (Kousha & Thelwall, 2009), and blogs (Kousha, Thelwall, & Rezaie, 2010), all showing significant correlations with citation counts.…”

A longitudinal study of Google Scholar coverage between 2012 and 2013

“…Journal coverage in these databases is also dramatically lower in the Social Sciences than in the Sciences. For instance, Kousha & Thelwall (2007) found that around 77% (49 of 64) of their selected journals in science disciplines, but only 13% (6 of 44) of social science journals were indexed in the Web of Science.…”

Substance without citation: evaluating the online impact of grey literature

“…In addition, other authors have evaluated the impact of academic journal articles through various online measurements (Kousha & Thelwall, 2007;Vaughan & Shaw, 2003), the impact (loosely speaking) of authors online (Cronin, Snyder, Rosenbaum, Martinson, & Callahan, 1998) and the spread of an issue online (Thelwall, Vann, & Fairclough, 2006). Nevertheless, no previous research has set out and evaluated a method for estimating the impact of nonacademic reports (e.g., white papers, online magazines or newsletters, promotional leaflets) using online methods.…”