A Reflection on the Applicability of Google Scholar as a Tool for Comprehensive Retrieval in Bibliometric Research and Systematic Reviews

Mojgan Houshyar · Hajar Sotudeh

8 citations0/0 files storedDOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals)

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

scientometrics and bibliometrics research Information Retrieval and Search Behavior Web visibility and informetrics

Abstract

Google Scholar has recently attracted great attentions as an open access multidisciplinary citation database, and a tool for retrieving scientific works for scientometricians and researchers. The present research intended to highlight the limitations brought about by efficiency policies of the search engine and its impact on the results available to users. To do so, it examined the accessibility of the retrieval results, through conducting 54 searches in this database. The results showed that the estimation of the results on the top of the first page returned by Google Scholar did not match that of the accessible results. Therefore, these statistics could not be accounted for to precisely determine the number of documents on a topic. Moreover, the results showed that although the subjects selected for the searches were very specific, the number of results for each search was very wide and exceeded the upper limit of 1,000 records authorized in Google Scholar for display. By limiting the searches to the title field, the number of the results was dramatically reduced. Since title is one of the most important representations of document contents in scientific and technical fields, this strategy can increase the precision of the results and thus the effectiveness of the retrievals. The investigation of the accessibility of the search results for the title field also showed that some documents, though scarce in number, were still inaccessible despite the fact that they were within the 1000-record limits. In addition, in title field search, some rare cases of duplicate records, incompatibilities between queries and documents were observed regarding the language of the documents and exact phrase search. The lack of automatic truncation in field searches was one of the most important issues necessitating the use of sophisticated search strategies.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

References

2013Is the coverage of google scholar enough to be used alone for systematic reviews 2011Is Google Scholar useful for bibliometrics? A webometric analysis 2012A preliminary test of Google Scholar as a source for citation data: a longitudinal study of Nobel prize winners 2006The Depth and Breadth of Google Scholar: An Empirical Study 2006Some measures for comparing citation databases 2010Comparison of PubMed and Google Scholar Literature Searches 2015Open access and sources of full-text articles in Google Scholar in different subject fields 2009Comparing Google Scholar and ISI Web of Science for Earth Sciences

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.