Chapter 13: Evaluating Google Scholar

In this chapter and the next, I will discuss the two major data sources for citation analysis, Google Scholar and Thomson ISI's Web of Science, in more detail. For a brief summary of these data sources, see Section 1.2. A detailed comparison of the impact of the use of different data sources can be found in Chapter 16: Citation analysis across disciplines: The Impact of different data sources and citation metrics

Instead of the Thomson ISI Web of Science or Elseviers Scopus, Publish or Perish uses Google Scholar data to calculate its various statistics. This was a conscious choice guided by a desire to make citation analysis accessible for every academic desirous to use it. Below I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Google Scholar in more detail.

• 13.1 Advantages of Google Scholar
• 13.1.1 Google Scholar is free
• 13.1.2 Google Scholar is easy to use
• 13.1.3 Google Scholar is quick
• 13.1.4 Google Scholar is comprehensive
• 13.2 Disadvantages of Google Scholar
• 13.2.1 Incorrect identification of authors
• 13.2.2 Some of Google scholars coverage might be problematic
• 13.2.3 Google processing occasionally creates nonsensical results
• 13.2.4 Google Scholar results are limited to the 1000 most cited papers
• 13.3 References