Google Scholar on par with Web of Science?

February 28th, 2006 Stewart Posted in Uncategorized |

This article was forwarded to me by a colleague. It is a brief, somewhat limited comparison of Web of Science and Google Scholar, and it posits that the two databases are basically equivalent in their capacity for counting citations. This conclusion is compelling, because ISI charges a small fortune for WOS, while Google Scholar is free to access. Another similar study from a month before reached the same conclusions: the two databases are roughly equal.

Two immediate thoughts that come to mind:

1. How difficult would it be to extract journal level “impact factors” from Google Scholar? The database can easily be searched by journal title and year restrictions — A well-written Google hack should be able to parse out the number of citations found within any given time frame.

2. Since Google’s search interface is hackable as well, a better search form could be relatively easy to build.

I’m not yet convinced of Google Scholar’s “equivalence” to products from ISI or Ovid or the like, but I do believe it’s only a matter of time, and most librarians I talk to seem to agree. That being the case, shouldn’t libraries begin building a better search interface and tools to capitalize on Google now, while the iron is still warming up?

[EDIT] A very interesting study was just forwarded to me on how to search both Google and WOS with adjacency operators. I’ll need more time to examine it closely, but it is quite good to see that others are finding ways to optimize their use of these resources.