A comparative analysis of social sciences citation tools
| Date | 25 September 2009 |
| Published date | 25 September 2009 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520911001954 |
| Pages | 986-996 |
| Author | Michael Levine‐Clark,Esther Gil |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
A comparative analysis of social
sciences citation tools
Michael Levine-Clark and Esther Gil
University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the utility of Web of Science, Scopus and Google
Scholar as citation analysis tools for the social sciences.
Design/methodology/approach – The 25 most-accessed articles in 163 social sciences journals are
searched in three citation databases.
Findings – Web of Science has long been the only tool for citation analysis. Scopus and Google
Scholar, while still new to the market, are complementary to Web of Science and in some cases can
provide a more nuanced view of the importance of scholarly articles in the social sciences.
Practical implications – As libraries struggle to provide the best tools to their users, they may
wish to consider the freely-available Google Scholar as a substitute or complement to expensive
databases such as Web of Science and Scopus.
Originality/value – Most analyses of citation databases have focused on the sciences. Because this
study examined the social sciences literature, it has expanded on the research available on Web of
Science, Google Scholar and Scopus.
Keywords Software tools,Databases
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Citation analysis is used to evaluate the journals in a field, and the research conducted
in a discipline, by a scholar or even of an entire country (Baird and Oppenheim, 1994).
In the academic world, citation analysis is often used to appraise the performance of a
researcher and is one important criterion for promotion and tenure. Despite criticism, it
has value as an analytical tool, since, as Baird and Oppenheim (1994, p. 8) stated,
“whatever measure you take for the eminence of an individual scientist or of a journal
or of an institution, citation counts provide strong correlation with that result”. They
further declared that “high citation counts mean a statistical likelihood of high quality
research” (Baird and Oppenheim, 1994, p. 8).
Before Eugene Garfield developed a method in 1955 for citation indexing for science
literature, Shepard’s Citations had been used in the legal professionsince 1873 (Garfield,
1955). When Garfieldproposed citation indexing forthe sciences, he suggested that such
a system would be “particularly useful...when one is tryingto evaluate the significance
of a particularwork and its impact on the literatureand thinking of the period” (Garfield,
1955, p. 109). Garfield further referred to the “impact factor” as a way of “evaluating the
relative importance of scientific journals” (Garfield, 1955, p. 109).
Garfield and Irving H. Sher later formally created the journal impact factor, one of
the tools used by Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to rank, compare and categorise
journals (Garfield, 2006). The impact factor is a ratio between the number of citation s in
a given year and the number of articles published in that journal over the past two
years, and is designed to show the relative importance of a journal to its discipline
(Thomson Reuters, 2008).
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
OIR
33,5
986
Refereed article received
2 January 2009
Approved for publication
21 May 2009
Online Information Review
Vol. 33 No. 5, 2009
pp. 986-996
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684520911001954
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