In today's technological developments, many academics, including students, are writing digital documents. However, finding the right reference source and determining whether an article contains elements of plagiarism or is still experiencing difficulties. Until now, academics have found information from unreliable sources, even though if this continues it can a negative impact on academi...

BACKGROUND Literature searches are essential to evidence-based respiratory care. To conduct literature searches, respiratory therapists rely on search engines to retrieve information, but there is a dearth of literature on the comparative efficiencies of search engines for researching clinical questions in respiratory care. OBJECTIVE To compare PubMed and Google Scholar search results for cli...

Purpose – To describe a small-scale quantitative evaluation of the scholarly information search engine, Google Scholar. Design/methodology/approach – Google Scholar’s ability to retrieve scholarly information was compared to that of three popular search engines: Ask.com, Google and Yahoo! Test queries were presented to all four search engines and the following measures were used to compare them...

Google Scholar is one of the major academic search engines but its ranking algorithm for academic articles is unknown. We performed the first steps to reverse-engineering Google Scholar’s ranking algorithm and present the results in this research-in-progress paper. The results are: Citation counts is the highest weighed factor in Google Scholar’s ranking algorithm. Therefore, highly cited artic...

Traditionally, the most commonly used source of bibliometric data is Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge, in particular the (Social) Science Citation Index and the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which provide the yearly Journal Impact Factors (JIF). This paper presents an alternative source of data (Google Scholar, GS) as well as three alternatives to the JIF to assess journal impact (the h-index, g-...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the new scientific search service Google Scholar (GS). It aims to discuss this search engine, which is intended exclusively for searching scholarly documents, and then empirically test its most important functionality. The focus is on an exploratory study which investigates the coverage of scientific serials in GS. Design/methodology/approach – ...

The official launch of Google Scholar Citations in 2011 opens a new horizon for analyzing the citations of individual researchers with unprecedented convenience and accuracy. This paper presents one of the first exploratory studies based on the data provided by Google Scholar Citations. More specifically, we conduct a series of investigations on: i) the overall citation patterns across differen...