{"id":172,"date":"2006-07-05T11:26:46","date_gmt":"2006-07-05T19:26:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/migrator.rab.olt.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/2006\/07\/05\/citation-rivals-google-scholar-scopus-web-of-science\/"},"modified":"2006-07-05T11:26:46","modified_gmt":"2006-07-05T19:26:46","slug":"citation-rivals-google-scholar-scopus-web-of-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/2006\/07\/citation-rivals-google-scholar-scopus-web-of-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Citation Rivals? Google scholar, Scopus, Web of Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this week’s Biomedical Digital Libraries (BDL)<\/a> – I sit on its advisory<\/a> a conflict?<\/strong><\/em> – there is an interesting article that compares citation counts in Web of Science<\/a> from Thomson Scientific, Scopus<\/a> from Elsevier and Google Scholar<\/a> from Google. Bakkalbasi et al compared citation counts in two specific areas of science: oncology<\/em><\/u> and condensed matter physics<\/em><\/u>. Were these two disciplines representative somehow?<\/p>\n

\"cited_search.jpg\"The article is entitled “Three options for citation tracking: Google scholar, Scopus and Web of Science”<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, and is worth a read.<\/p>\n

The authors conclude that “All three [search] tools returned some unique material. Our data indicate that the question of which tool provides the most complete set of citing literature may depend on the subject and publication year of a given article.”<\/em> That’s self-evident; the dissimilarity of tools is a priori <\/em>evidence of the authors’ conclusions.<\/p>\n

This paper makes some assumptions based on an assessment of two very narrow subjects. In that sense, the paper has limited value. What I like about the paper is that it attempts to compare three dissimilar citation tracking tools, which is much appreciated. The conclusion that all three tools are needed is defensible<\/em>, though it could be argued that each search tool is used for quite different purposes.<\/p>\n

The challenge with comparative studies like this? Study design is difficult. The problem (or challenge) is the issue of coverage in each source, which is markedly different.<\/em> And, in the case of Google scholar, we don’t know what is covered.<\/p>\n

It seems obvious to librarians that Google scholar is not<\/strong><\/u> a reliable citation tool<\/u><\/em> (though the cited by feature<\/em><\/u> is generally viewed as useful). “Cited by” in GS is only meant to be an indicator<\/em> of citedness, and to lead to other scholarship. Results should be contextualized by comparing the same searches<\/em> in WoS.<\/p>\n

Conclusion? Even though it too has limitations, WoS is still the best indicator of citation counts for academic papers, across all disciplines.<\/strong><\/em> (I am unable to comment about Scopus as UBC Library does not subscribe to it.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this week’s Biomedical Digital Libraries (BDL) – I sit on its advisory a conflict? – there is an interesting article that compares citation counts in Web of Science from Thomson Scientific, Scopus from Elsevier and Google Scholar from Google. Bakkalbasi et al compared citation counts in two specific areas of science: oncology and condensed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/googlescholar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}