Getting close to Google Scholar

marzo 19th, 2012 · No hay Comentarios

When we are thinking on writing an academic document, we are asked -and must- to use reliable information sources, that is where Google Scholar can help us. This information management tool search internet in order to find acamedic works related with the topics you ask to. One of the features which make Google Scholar such a good searcher is that it gives a short description, and also the times it has been cited. That is why when I was writing my class record about Google Scholar, I use it to get information about itself, and this is what I found:

Péter Jacsó, Google Scholar: the pros and the cons, Online Information Review, Vol. 29 Iss: 2, pp.208 – 214. Retrieved from: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=1468-4527&volume=29&issue=2&articleid=1464936&show=html
Noruzi, A., Google Scholar : the new generation of citation indexes, 2005. In LIBRI. pp.170-180. Retrieved from: http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/7160#.T0X8B1si_FZ
Anne-Wil Harzing & Ron van der Wal, Google Scholar: the democratization of citation analysis?, Version November 2007. Retreived from: http://imechanica.org/files/gsdemo.pdf

The word “source” as used on Wikipedia has three related meanings: the piece of work itself, the creator of the work, and the publisher of the work. All three can affect reliability. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

If we analyze the reliability of these sources understanding the word “source” as used on Wikipedia, we should analyze the author, the document and the publisher separately. The authors of these three documents are well known academic persons (Péter Jacsó, for example is a teacher of University of Hawaii, who has published a lot of documents), experts, who give their work a minimum relevance. As for the publishers, two of these documents have been published in a journal (the first one in Online Information Review, and the second one in LIBRI. Being published in a journal is a good way to underline the reliability of the content, mainly, because, before publishing a journal, an exam of the content is needed. Finally, the easiest way to check the relevance and the reliability of a document is to see how many references does it use. In this case, even though it is not possible to see “Google Scholar: the pros and the cons” document´s references, we can say that the number of references is high (more than ten).

The impact factor (citation impact) is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. University of virginia

However, there is another way to check the reliability of these sources: seeing their citation impact. The citation impact is based on the times a document has been cited. For these three examples, we can see that they have a high citation impact: the first one has been cited 164 times, the second one 126 times, and, finally, the third one 14.