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Google Scholar: the New Generation of Citation Indexes Libri, 2005, vol. 55, pp. 170–180 Copyright Saur 2005 ______________________________________________ Printed in Germany · All rights reserved Libri ISSN 0024-2667 Google Scholar: The New Generation of Citation Indexes ALIREZA NORUZI Department of Library and Information Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) provides a new an overview of how to use Google Scholar for citation method of locating potentially relevant articles on a given analysis and identifies advanced search techniques not well subject by identifying subsequent articles that cite a pre- documented by Google Scholar. This study also compares viously published article. An important feature of Google the citation counts provided by Web of Science and Google Scholar is that researchers can use it to trace interconnec- Scholar for articles in the field of “Webometrics.” It makes tions among authors citing articles on the same topic and to several suggestions for improving Google Scholar. Finally, it determine the frequency with which others cite a specific concludes that Google Scholar provides a free alternative or article, as it has a “cited by" feature. This study begins with complement to other citation indexes. Background of the study and relating them to each other was difficult. The proposed retrieval solution for the Web has been Eugene Garfield first outlined the idea of a uni- called a “Web Citation Index” (Eysenbach and fied citation index to the literature of science in Diepgen 1998). In effect, Google Scholar builds 1955. “Citation indexes resolve semantic prob- something similar to the Science Citation Index lems associated with traditional subject indexes (SCI), which was proposed 50 years ago for paper by using citation symbology rather than words to publishing, and provides the first Web citation describe the content of a document” (Weinstock index. 1971). Eugene Garfield’s main purpose in propos- Citations link articles on a specific topic, and ing the construction of a citation index for sci- Google Scholar is built on the basis of this inter- ence, in which the references in scientific articles nal structure of subject literatures. However, as are used as index terms, was for the citation in- noted at the start of this article, the citation index dex to function as an information retrieval tool is not a recent idea. In fact, “the first practical ap- for scientific information (Garfield 1955). The ra- plication of a citation index was Shepard’s Cita- tionale behind this kind of indexing is to exploit tions, a legal reference tool that has been in use what Garfield calls the “association-of-ideas” or since 1873” (Weinstock 1971). Moreover, citation “Citations are the formal, explicit linkages be- analysis is not a new idea. For instance, since the tween papers that have particular points in appearance of Islam in a branch of Islamic theol- common” (Garfield 1979, 1). ogy called the Science of Hadith, researchers have Soon after the beginning of the World Wide identified the accuracy and legitimacy of docu- Web, the literature available on the Web increased ments (sources) based on citations alone (Horri very rapidly. The growing amount of literature 1983). For more information about the history on the Web and the need for multidisciplinary in- and role of citation indexing, see the works pub- formation retrieval accentuated the need for im- lished by Dr. Eugene Garfield who has opened proved retrieval methods because while the many doors for research and applications in in- documents were readily available, locating them fometrics, scientometrics and bibliometrics. Alireza Noruzi, Department of Library and Information Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. E-mail: anouruzi@ yahoo.com. Web: http://www.nouruzi.itgo.com 170 Google Scholar The principal rationale and advantage for ticle at a later point in time. In Google Scholar, Google Scholar is that it will democratize access “papers with many citations are generally ranked to the intellectual resources of elite institutions highest, and they get a further boost if they are (Banks 2005). Google Scholar enables researchers referenced by highly cited articles” (Butler to navigate the scholarly literature on the Web in 2004). Google Scholar ranks search results by unique ways. Researchers are able to locate related how relevant they are to a query, considering the articles, independent of title words, language, title and the full text of each article as well as the nomenclature or author-supplied keywords. This publication in which the article appeared and automated citation index is a multidisciplinary how often it has been cited in other scholarly lit- index covering virtually all sciences and disci- erature (Google Scholar 2005). So the most related plines and not limited to a single language, coun- documents should appear at the top of the re- try, field or discipline; it also covers all types of trieved results. Furthermore, Google Scholar published source items. However, Google Scholar automatically extracts and analyzes citations and is not fully comprehensive. presents them as separate results, even if the The purpose of this study is to answer the fol- documents they refer to are not available on the lowing questions: Web. So it analyzes the popularity of a document according to the number of times it has been cited • What is the purpose of Google Scholar as a free cita- by other documents, and generally displays the tion index? retrieved results showing the most-cited refer- • What are the advantages and disadvantages of Google ences first. Scholar? In the future, Google Scholar may be used for citation analysis, through bibliometric tech- Introduction to Google Scholar niques, which measure the impact factor of an individual publication as a function of the num- Google Scholar is the scholarly search tool of the ber of citations it receives from subsequent au- world’s largest and most powerful search engine, thors. In addition, any author may legitimately Google. Google Scholar was developed by wish to determine whether his/her own work Anurag Acharya, an Indian-born computer scien- has been criticized or used by others on the Web. tist. It is an incredible tool allowing researchers to Authors are interested in knowing whether any- locate a wide array of scholarly literature on the one has cited their works and/or whether other Web, including scholarly journals, abstracts, peer- researchers in their fields have commented on reviewed articles, theses, dissertations, books, them. Google Scholar facilitates this type of feed- preprints, PowerPoint presentations and techni- back in the scholarly communication cycle on the cal reports from universities, academic institu- Web. Regardless of the year that the article was tions, professional societies, research groups, and published, Google Scholar permits researchers to preprint repositories around the world. As such, identify where that article was cited. Researchers it has become a gateway to accessing scholarly in- can locate recent articles that have cited the par- formation on the Web. Every day more scholarly ticular article. A further use of Google Scholar is information is available online and we continue to identify scientists currently working in specific to discover new reasons to need access to this in- branches of science in order to suggest collabora- formation. If Google Scholar makes more open- tion, to enter into correspondence, etc. Moreover, access scholarly material accessible, the price of Google Scholar provides remote access to the in- academic journals and databases may decrease or dexed resources. stabilize as they strive to compete. Thus the greater the accessibility of scholarly material, the Comparing Google Scholar and Web of greater is the value for researchers. Science What makes Google Scholar most useful is its citation index feature. Google Scholar consists of A commonly used technique of conducting a lit- articles, with a sub-list under each article of the erature search is to begin the search with a rele- subsequently published resources that cite the ar- vant article and look up the references cited in ticle; Google Scholar shows who cited a given ar- this article as well as the articles citing it. For ex- 171 Alireza Noruzi ample, in 1997 Almind and Ingwersen published Scholar and go backward and then forward again a paper in the Journal of Documentation entitled into related articles via cited references (see Ta- “Informetric analyses on the World Wide Web: ble 1 and 2). methodological approaches to webometrics.” In this paper, they established the word “webomet- Table 1. Citation counts from Google Scholar and Web of Science (WoS) for Almind & Ingwersen (20 September 2005) rics” as a synonym for the concept of “bibliomet- ________________________________________________________________________________ ric studies on the World Wide Web”. This paper is Times Times Citations Citations Citations among the first in the literature of webometrics. Cited on Cited on only on only on on both G. S. WoS G. S. WoS Customarily, when other authors use the term ________________________________________________________________________________ 98 81 64 47 34 “webometrics” in subsequent articles, they will ________________________________________________________________________________ give credit to Almind and Ingwersen as the origi- nators of the term, by citing their original article. The analysis of citations shows that Google As a result, in Google Scholar, the
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