A recent opinion piece published in eLife bemoaned the way that citations are used to judge academics because we are not even certain of the veracity of this information. The main complaint was that Google Scholar – a service that aggregates citations to articles using a computer program – may be less-than-reliable.
There are three main sources of citation statistics: Scopus, Web of Knowledge/Science and Google Scholar; although other sources are out there. These are commonly used and I checked out how comparable these databases are for articles from our lab.
The ratio of citations is approximately 1:1:1.2 for Scopus:WoK:GS. So Google Scholar is a bit like a footballer, it gives 120%.
I first did this comparison in 2012 and again in 2013. The ratio has remained constant, although these are the same articles, and it is a very limited dataset. In the eLife opinion piece, Eve Marder noted an extra ~30% citations for GS (although I calculated it as ~40%, 894/636=1.41). Talking to colleagues, they have also noticed this. It’s clear that there is some inflation with GS, although the degree of inflation may vary by field. So where do these extra citations come from?
- Future citations: GS is faster than Scopus and WoK. Articles appear there a few days after they are published, whereas it takes several weeks or months for the same articles to appear in Scopus and WoK.
- Other papers: some journals are not in Scopus and WoK. Again, these might be new journals that aren’t yet included at the others, but GS doesn’t discriminate and includes all papers it finds. One of our own papers (an invited review at a nascent OA journal) is not covered by Scopus and WoK*. GS picks up preprints whereas the others do not.
- Other stuff: GS picks up patents and PhD theses. While these are not traditional papers, published in traditional journals, they are clearly useful and should be aggregated.
- Garbage: GS does pick up some stuff that is not a real publication. One example is a product insert for an antibody, which has a reference section. Another is duplicate publications. It is quite good at spotting these and folding them into a single publication, but some slip through.
OK, Number 4 is worrying, but the other citations that GS detects versus Scopus and WoK are surely a good thing. I agree with the sentiment expressed in the eLife paper that we should be careful about what these numbers mean, but I don’t think we should just disregard citation statistics as suggested.
GS is free, while the others are subscription-based services. It did look for a while like Google was going to ditch Scholar, but a recent interview with the GS team (sorry, I can’t find the link) suggests that they are going to keep it active and possibly develop it further. Checking out your citations is not just an ego-trip, it’s a good way to find out about articles that are related to your own work. GS has a nice feature that send you an email whenever it detects a citation for your profile. The downside of GS is that its terms of service do not permit scraping and reuse, whereas downloading of subsets of the other databases is allowed.
In summary, I am a fan of Google Scholar. My page is here.
* = I looked into this a bit more and the paper is actually in WoK, it has no Title and it has 7 citations (versus 12 in GS). Although it doesn’t come up in a search for Fiona or for me.
However, I know from GS that this paper was also cited in a paper by the Cancer Genome Atlas Network in Nature. WoK listed this paper as having 0 references and 0 citations(!). Does any of this matter? Well, yes. WoK is a Thomson Reuters product and is used as the basis for their dreaded Impact Factor – which (like it or not) is still widely used for decision making. Also many Universities use WoK information in their hiring and promotions processes.
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The post title comes from ‘Give, Give, Give Me More, More, More’ by The Wonder Stuff from the LP ‘Eight Legged Groove Machine’. Finding a post title was difficult this time. I passed on: Pigs (Three Different Ones) and Juxtapozed with U. My iTunes library is lacking songs about citations…
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