Universities through the eyes of bibliographic databases: a retroactive growth comparison of Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to ascertain the suitability of GS's url-based method as a valid approximation of universities' academic output measures, taking into account three aspects (retroactive growth, correlation, and coverage). To do this, a set of 100 Turkish universities were selected as a case study. The productivity in Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and GS (2000 to 2013) were captured in two different measurement iterations (2014 and 2018). In addition, a total of 18,174 documents published by a subset of 14 research-focused universities were retrieved from WoS, verifying their presence in GS within the official university web domain. Findings suggest that the retroactive growth in GS is unpredictable and dependent on each university, making this parameter hard to evaluate at the institutional level. Otherwise, the correlation of productivity between GS (url-based method) and WoS and Scopus (selected sources) is moderately positive, even though it varies depending on the university, the year of publication, and the year of measurement. Finally, only 16% out of 18,174 articles analyzed were indexed in the official university website, although up to 84% were indexed in other GS sources. This work proves that the url-based method to calculate institutional productivity in GS is not a good proxy for the total number of publications indexed in WoS and Scopus, at least in the national context analyzed. However, the main reason is not directly related to the operation of GS, but with a lack of universities' commitment to open access.

Trends and status in resources security, ecological stability, and sustainable development research: a systematic analysis

“…As a bibliometric data collection tool, the Google Scholar database has a wide range of research, but the data quality is relatively low, and the repetition rate is high (Bar-Ilan 2010 ; Harzing 2019 ). Web of science is a comprehensive database (Orduna-Malea et al 2019 ). It provides unified and standardized literature, which can better visualize the collected data.…”

The Rhythms of Scholarly Publication: Suggestions to Enhance Bibliometric Comparisons Across Disciplines

“…Studies focused on the relationship between journal articles and econometric patterns are informative in many disciplines (largely STEM areas), but reliance on these studies to guide bibliometric evaluations across a broader range of disciplines underscores the central premise of this Opinion: the publications of scholars in disciplines likely to win fewer grants, generate fewer patents, and produce fewer journal articles are not adequately represented in many bibliometric analyses and data sources. Some bibliometric databases represent curated lists of journal titles (e.g., Web of Science, Scopus), but often are biased in favor of archiving the published works of STEM scholars (e.g., Orduna-Malea et al, 2019 ).…”

Ethnomathematics on Traditional Culture: A Bibliometric Mapping Analysis and Systematic Review on Database Scopus

“…The Scopus database was developed by Elsevier, combining the characteristics of both PubMed and Web of Science [27]. The Scopus academic database was chosen because The growth rate is higher [28], providing access to a collection of information commonly used for research and writing [29], and offers a basic search, a quick search, an author search, an advanced search, and a source search [30].…”