Comparison of Google Scholar and Web Of Science for Citation Analysis

Prof. Anne-Wil Harzing has a very interesting article titled "Reflections of Google Scholar" comparing Google Scholar and Web of Science for citation analysis.

"If an academic shows good citation metrics, it is very likely that he or she has made a significant impact on the field. However, the reverse is not necessarily true. If an academic shows weak citation metrics, this may be caused a lack of impact on the field. However, it may also be caused by working in a small field, publishing in a language other than English (LOTE), or publishing mainly (in) books."

Harzing has also developped a software called "Publish or Perish" using Google Scholar content where the program provides analysis of citations including total number of citations, average number of citations per paper, average number of citations per author, average number of papers per author, average number of citations per year.

Now that Elsevier content will be available in Google and Google Scholar, it would be interesting to see how the numbers of Prof. Hanzing analysis will change in reference to "not all scholarly journals are indexed in GS" and GS overlap with WoS and Scopus.