Google Scholar and the h-index in biomedicine: the popularization of bibliometric asessment

TL;DR

This paper reviews Google Scholar's bibliometric tools and the h-index, comparing their features, benefits, and limitations in biomedicine, and assesses their validity for research evaluation and information retrieval.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of Google Scholar metrics with Web of Science and Scopus, highlighting its potential and limitations for biomedical research evaluation.

Findings

Google Scholar h-index values are about 30% higher than Web of Science.

Google Scholar h-index values are about 15% higher than Scopus.

Google Scholar rankings are consistent with other databases despite differences in h-index values.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to review the features, benefits and limitations of the new scientific evaluation products derived from Google Scholar; Google Scholar Metrics and Google Scholar Citations, as well as the h-index which is the standard bibliometric indicator adopted by these services. It also outlines the potential of this new database as a source for studies in Biomedicine and compares the h-index obtained by the most relevant journals and researchers in the field of Intensive Care Medicine, by means of data extracted from Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. Results show that, although average h-index values in Google Scholar are almost 30% higher than those obtained in Web of Science and about 15% higher than those collected by Scopus, there are no substantive changes in the rankings generated from either data source. Despite some technical problems, it is concluded that Google Scholar is a valid tool for researchers in Health Sciences, both for purposes of information retrieval and computation of bibliometric indicators