A New Era in Citation and Bibliometric Analyses: Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar

TL;DR

This study compares Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar for citation analysis, revealing differences in citation counts, coverage, and processing time, and discusses their implications for scholarly evaluation.

Contribution

It provides an empirical comparison of three major citation databases, highlighting their strengths, weaknesses, and impact on citation-based assessments.

Findings

Google Scholar identified more citations than WoS and Scopus.

Processing time varied greatly, with GS taking significantly longer.

Coverage and quality of citations differed among the databases.

Abstract

Academic institutions, federal agencies, publishers, editors, authors, and librarians increasingly rely on citation analysis for making hiring, promotion, tenure, funding, and/or reviewer and journal evaluation and selection decisions. The Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) citation databases have been used for decades as a starting point and often as the only tools for locating citations and/or conducting citation analyses. ISI databases (or Web of Science), however, may no longer be adequate as the only or even the main sources of citations because new databases and tools that allow citation searching are now available. Whether these new databases and tools complement or represent alternatives to Web of Science (WoS) is important to explore. Using a group of 15 library and information science faculty members as a case study, this paper examines the effects of using Scopus and Google Scholar (GS) on the citation counts and rankings of scholars as measured by WoS. The paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of WoS, Scopus, and GS, their overlap and uniqueness, quality and language of the citations, and the implications of the findings for citation analysis. The project involved citation searching for approximately 1,100 scholarly works published by the study group and over 200 works by a test group (an additional 10 faculty members). Overall, more than 10,000 citing and purportedly citing documents were examined. WoS data took about 100 hours of collecting and processing time, Scopus consumed 200 hours, and GS a grueling 3,000 hours.