
The main bibliometric tools
Let's take some time to look in detail at each of the main three tools used for bibliometric and citation analyses. It is really important that you know which publications are covered by these tools, the breadth and depth of coverage and the citation analysis features available to you. This will help inform your decision as to whether you should use one or more of these tools for research assessment purposes.
We'll discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each of the three tools in module 2
Strengths |
Weaknesses | |
---|---|---|
Web of Science (part of the Web of Knowlede suite of resources) | -Advanced citation searching and analysis features -Citation data availale from 1900 -Broad coverage of high impact journals -Additional citation data is available in WOk by searching all databases |
-Conference papers, book chapters and dissertations all excluded -Limited coverage of non-English language articles -Conference proceedings are available but may not be part of your library's subscription |
Scopus | -Advanced citation searching and analysis features -Better coverage of social science titles -Includes conference proceedings |
-Only one library in Scotland has access, and it is not us! -Books, book chapters and dissertations all excluded -Citation data from papers published from 1996 - |
Google Scholar (publish or perish) | -Free -Covers non-English language publications -Covers all types of publications including books and conference publications |
-No quality control, lots of errors in data -Does not cover all journals -Covers non-scholarly content -Coverage uneven across disciplines -Difficult to deal with name variants |
My RI by University College Dublin, Dublin City University, Dublin Institute of Technology, The National University
of Ireland, Maynooth and the NDLR adapted by Marion Kelt, Glasgow Caledonian University is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.ndlr.ie/myri/.