Professional Reading Shelf
International Affairs–Bibliographies
Source: Air University Library
Three New Bibliographies
+ Japan
+ Russia
+ Saudi Arabia
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Web Search–Google
New Study: Google Scholar Does VERY WELL Compared to Thomson ISI citation index
The UBC Google Scholar Blog points to a summary article/interview about a new study (full text here) that shows that Google Scholar does as well as ISI’s Web of Science (WOS) in citation counts. Interesting and more good news for Google and perhaps not so good news for Thomson Scientific. A few random thoughts and things I’m thinking about after reading the article.
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+ I’ll let Dr. Peter Jacso speak for himself (he’s a great writer, a comprehensive reviewer, and I’m honored to say a friend and mentor) but the summary says that Dr. Jacso’s articles and reviews of Google Scholar, he’s written three of them (1 2 3) might be biased (specifically the first one listed above) since he is on a Thomson advisory board***. That’s weak. Its been my experience that Peter says it like it is and has the data to back it up. Btw, Dr. Jacso has been VERY positive about other autonomous citation indexing services like CiteSeer.

+ Second, the word “outperform” means many things. OK, in this study the citation counts were close but the searchability of material on WOS is much stronger. In other words, you can do more to precisely find what you need. True, Google Scholar does offer an advanced search page that, for example, allows you to limit by source. However, getting a source list from Google (something I’ve asked many times) is impossible. Also, WOS offers more usability (at least at this time) with your results (email, bib formatting, alerts, etc.). What about time to index inclusion? How long does it take for new material to find its way into WOS vs. Google Scholar. Perhaps someone is working on that study now.

+ Third, a point I made from day one of Google Scholar’s public existence is that Google does not provide any type of definition of what they are and ARE NOT indexing. For example, while I’m honored that ResourceShelf is indexed in Google Scholar, I’ll be the first to say that our blog is not a scholarly source in even the broadest definition of the term. Our articles and links for non-scholarly cites considered a citation? How does GS define a citation? Is a conference presentation considered a citation if on one of the slides it mentions an article or book? We don’t know since we don’t know their collection/crawling policy. So how can we compare?

Btw, here Google Scholar shows 8 entries for our one blog. Also, Jacso points out that the “hit” totals found on Google Scholar are not very accurate. No surprise since it’s been discussed many times and for many years that the page totals from Google’s web database (and other large web engines) are inaccurate. That’s why we’ve said many times not to use web search total size estimates to determine the popularity of something.

+ From the article, “Dr. Pauly also notes that Thomson ISI is 40 years old, while Google Scholar “is one and a half years old, and will improve.” This might very well be the case, but how does Dr. Pauly know for sure? We still have not learned the business plan (if any) for Google Scholar. Forget business plan, what’s the long-term plan for Google Scholar? Remember that the project itself began as a Google researcher’s (Anurag Acharya, a great guy and very smart man) 20% time project. What happens if things/people change at Google? Will the Google of 2006 be the same Google in 2008? What business is Google (or any large general purpose web engine) in? I think most people would agree that Google (a bit more so that others) is in the advertising business, since 99%of their revenues come from ads. This is not a bad thing (unless you just don’t like advertising) but thinking of Google in the same way we think of the business other info companies (Dialog/Thomson, LexisNexis, Factiva, etc.) is really not accurate. Btw, what would some in the education/academic community say if keyword and contextual advertising came to Google Scholar results pages?

+ A fast fact: Thomson just launched a new component product (part of Web of Knowledge) called Web Citation Index. It would be interesting to see how this new database and GS compare. Selection methods, usability, etc. I believe some of the technology to power this product uses technology that’s also used by CiteSeer.

Bottom Lines? One, as Dean points out, it’s good to talk about these issues. Two, as I’ve said many many many times, it’s all about the right tool/resource at the right time. Remember, librarians should like alternatives. Alternatives and choices (both free and fee) are good.

See Also #1: Just for fun! Aviation is one of my (Gary’s) interests. I was searching Google Scholar and found a citation written by someone with a last name (a word you can’t say on tv in the U.S.) Is this true? Nope, parsing issues, a challenge for all database builders (not only Google). Nevertheless, what makes this a bit more surprising is that the data comes directly from a bibliographic database. Btw, the author’s name is actually Peng Shi. I’m sure you can guess the letter Google added to his name.
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*** See Also #2: Dr. Jacso has told ResourceShelf that he is not on an Advisory Board of ISI. He goes on to say, “I have been on the advisory committee of the JCR [Journal Citation Reports] some years ago…There is a big difference between Thomson ISI advisory board and ISI advisory group (for JCR) in terms of involvement in ISI matters.”

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