Google Scholar is one of the major academic search engines but its ranking algorithm for academic articles is unknown. We performed the first steps to reverse-engineering Google Scholar’s ranking algorithm and present the results in this research-in-progress paper. The results are: Citation counts is the highest weighed factor in Google Scholar’s ranking algorithm. Therefore, highly cited artic...

Traditionally, the most commonly used source of bibliometric data is Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge, in particular the (Social) Science Citation Index and the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which provide the yearly Journal Impact Factors (JIF). This paper presents an alternative source of data (Google Scholar, GS) as well as three alternatives to the JIF to assess journal impact (the h-index, g-...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the new scientific search service Google Scholar (GS). It aims to discuss this search engine, which is intended exclusively for searching scholarly documents, and then empirically test its most important functionality. The focus is on an exploratory study which investigates the coverage of scientific serials in GS. Design/methodology/approach – ...

The official launch of Google Scholar Citations in 2011 opens a new horizon for analyzing the citations of individual researchers with unprecedented convenience and accuracy. This paper presents one of the first exploratory studies based on the data provided by Google Scholar Citations. More specifically, we conduct a series of investigations on: i) the overall citation patterns across differen...

This paper evaluates the content of Google Scholar and seven other databases (Academic Search Elite, AgeLine, ArticleFirst, GEOBASE, POPLINE, Social Sciences Abstracts, and Social Sciences Citation Index) within the multidisciplinary subject area of later-life migration. Each database is evaluated with reference to a set of 155 core articles selected in advance—the most important studies of lat...

IT may appear blasphemous to paraphrase the title of the classic article of Vannevar Bush but it may be a mitigating factor that it is done to pay tribute to another legendary scientist, Eugene Garfield. His ideas of citationbased searching, resource discovery and quantitative evaluation of publications serve as the basis for many of the most innovative and powerful online information services ...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to measure the coverage of Google Scholar for the Library and Information Science (LIS) journal literature as identified by a list of core LIS journals from a study by Schlögl and Petschnig (2005). Methods: We checked every article from 35 major LIS journals from the years 2004 to 2006 for availability in Google Scholar (GS). We also collected information o...

The aim of this report is to present a ranking of Nursing journals covered in Google Scholar Metrics (GSM), a Google product launched in 2012 to assess the impact of scientific journals from citation counts this receive on Google Scholar. Google has chosen to include only those journals that have published at least 100 papers and have at least one citation in a period of five years (2007-2011)....