Can Google Scholar and Mendeley help to assess the scholarly impacts of dissertations?
Kayvan Kousha, Mike Thelwall

TL;DR
This study develops a multistage method to extract Google Scholar citation counts for dissertations, compares them with Mendeley reader counts, and assesses their usefulness for impact evaluation across disciplines and age groups.
Contribution
Introduces a new multistage extraction method for Google Scholar citations of dissertations and compares its effectiveness with Mendeley reader counts for impact assessment.
Findings
Google Scholar citations are more useful for older dissertations, especially in social sciences and humanities.
Mendeley reader counts are more effective for recent dissertations less than two years old.
The method achieves over 95% precision in extracting citation data from Google Scholar.
Abstract
Dissertations can be the single most important scholarly outputs of junior researchers. Whilst sets of journal articles are often evaluated with the help of citation counts from the Web of Science or Scopus, these do not index dissertations and so their impact is hard to assess. In response, this article introduces a new multistage method to extract Google Scholar citation counts for large collections of dissertations from repositories indexed by Google. The method was used to extract Google Scholar citation counts for 77,884 American doctoral dissertations from 2013-2017 via ProQuest, with a precision of over 95%. Some ProQuest dissertations that were dual indexed with other repositories could not be retrieved with ProQuest-specific searches but could be found with Google Scholar searches of the other repositories. The Google Scholar citation counts were then compared with Mendeley…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
Topicsscientometrics and bibliometrics research · Research Data Management Practices · Academic Publishing and Open Access
