PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD Google Scholar, launched in 2004, has long been a valuable tool for researchers in a range of academic and scientific fields. In July, Google improved the service with the addition of Google Scholar Citations (GSC), which allows authors of articles to create profiles and list all of their articles available through Google Scholar.
GSC promises to be a powerful metrics tool, as it tracks how many times a paper has appeared as a citation and provides an h-index, which measures the impact of an individual scientist’s research.
With GSC, “authors can check who is citing their publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics,” explains Google. Still in beta testing, GSC is currently available by invitation only, but should soon be open to all researchers.
Analysis of citations from 1.7 million computer science publications in Microsoft Academic Search data shows the relative importance of different fields and the flow of citations between them. (Source: C. Bergstrom & J. West/mapequation.org)
A similar search tool, Microsoft Academic Search (MAS), was started by Microsoft in 2009 and has recently added new metrics tools. Microsoft’s service charts publication trends, citation networks, and researcher rankings.
A recent article in Nature News weighed the value of Microsoft and Google’s new free metrics tools. According to the article, MAS offers more features than GSC, but Google Scholar’s vast library of articles is a distinct advantage.
"Microsoft Academic Search is still a nascent offering to the community," Lee Dirks, director of education and scholarly communication at Microsoft Research Connections, told Nature News.
Services like Google Scholar are often criticized for their high error rates, but engineers say that recent improvements like GSC make the tools more and more reliable. Anurag Acharya, the Google engineer behind Google Scholar, argues that the level of errors in the service is low enough that it does not damage the accuracy of metrics like the h-index.
Similar commercial services, like Reuters and Scopus, often have smaller and more accurate collections of citations. The free cost and large scope of services like GSC and MAS, however, could make them competitive with commercial tools.
"They have the major advantage of being freely available to anyone, and with continued development I think they have the potential to become serious competitors to the commercial products," Carl Bergstrom, a biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, told Nature News.
Ton van Raan, a bibliometrics expert at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, added, "It is clear that the commercial citation index producers will be more and more in competition with these free-access facilities."
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