Three options for citation tracking: Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science

By Nisa Bakkalbasi, Kathleen Bauer, Janis Glover, Lei Wang. Biomedical Digital Libraries, 2006

742 citations recorded by the source corpus.

BackgroundResearchers turn to citation tracking to find the most influential articles for a particular topic and to see how often their own published papers are cited. For years researchers looking for this type of information had only one resource to consult: the Web of Science from Thomson Scientific. In 2004 two competitors emerged – Scopus from Elsevier and Google Scholar from Google. The research reported here uses citation analysis in an observational study examining these three databases; comparing citation counts for articles from two disciplines (oncology and condensed matter physics) and two years (1993 and 2003) to test the hypothesis that the different scholarly publication coverage provided by the three search tools will lead to different citation counts from each.MethodsEleven journal titles with varying impact factors were selected from each discipline (oncology and condensed matter physics) using the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). All articles published in the selected titles were retrieved for the years 1993 and 2003, and a stratified random sample of articles was chosen, resulting in four sets of articles. During the week of November 7–12, 2005, the citation counts for each research article were extracted from the three sources. The actual citing references for a subset of the articles published in 2003 were also gathered from each of the three sources.ResultsFor oncology 1993 Web of Science returned the highest average number of citations, 45.3. Scopus returned the highest average number of citations (8.9) for oncology 2003. Web of Science returned the highest number of citations for condensed matter physics 1993 and 2003 (22.5 and 3.9 respectively). The data showed a significant difference in the mean citation rates between all pairs of resources except between Google Scholar and Scopus for condensed matter physics 2003. For articles published in 2003 Google Scholar returned the largest amount of unique citing material for oncology and Web of Science returned the most for condensed matter physics.ConclusionThis study did not identify any one of these three resources as the answer to all citation tracking needs. Scopus showed strength in providing citing literature for current (2003) oncology articles, while Web of Science produced more citing material for 2003 and 1993 condensed matter physics, and 1993 oncology articles. All three 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.

Subfields: History and Philosophy of Science, Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/106e6375b6e988652e2e4a666a75225a115bd4d5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In History and Philosophy of Science

In Information Systems and Management

In Statistics and Probability

Citations in the corpus

Suitability of Google Scholar as a source of scientific information and as a source of data for scientific evaluation - Review of the Literature (2017, result): “o predict rankings as GS does not have a clear indexing policy; an issue that has been pointed to in several other studies Bar-Ilan, 2008; Gray et al., 2012; Jacsó, 2012; Wildgaard, 2015). The h-indices of highly cited researchers based on GS were considerably different from the values obtained usin”
Which academic search systems are suitable for systematic reviews or meta‐analyses? Evaluating retrieval qualities of Google Scholar, PubMed, and 26 other resources (2020, background): “71-73 These comparisons support the idea that larger search systems tend to have greater citation coverage.”
Informetrics at the beginning of the 21st century - A review (2008, methodology): “Bakkalbasi et al. (2006) compared the three databases (WOS, Scopus and Scholar) using eleven journal titles in oncology and condensed matter physics and reached the conclusion that the “study did not identify any one of these three resources as the answer to all citation needs” (p.”
A review of the literature on citation impact indicators (2015, background): “Bakkalbasi et al. (2006) compare WoS, Scopus, and Google Scholar in the fields of oncology and condensed matter physics and indicate that none of the three databases consistently outperforms”
Comparison of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar: strengths and weaknesses (2007, result): “This observation has also been confirmed in a previous comparison of the three citation databases (9).”
Comparing Bibliometric Statistics Obtained from the Web of Science and Scopus (2009, result): “One of the few macro-level bibliometric studies is that of Ball and Tunger (2006), which compared the citation rates obtained with the two databases.”
Patient Engagement as an Emerging Challenge for Healthcare Services: Mapping the Literature (2012, background): “Analysis of the cooccurrence of the terms “patient” & “engagement” appearing in keywords, titles, and abstracts within the health academic and managerial literature was conducted on June 17st, 2012, using the electronic databases more likely to cover the core research publications in health issues (”
2009 Updated Method Guidelines for Systematic Reviews in the Cochrane Back Review Group (2009, background): “Quasi-RCTs—Quasi-RCTs may be included if there are fewer than 5 RCTs. Quasi-RCTs are controlled clinical trials that use methods of allocation that are not random, and therefore, may be open to bias.”