The Visibility of Authority Records,Researcher Identifiers,Academic Social Networking Profiles,and Related Faculty Publications in Search Engine Results

Information about faculty and their publications can be found in library databases such as the Library of Congress Name Authority File, VIAF, WorldCat, and institutional repositories; in identifier registries such as ORCID and ISNI; and on academic social networking sites such as Academia, Google Scholar, and ResearchGate, but the way search engines use such identifiers and profiles is unclear. Therefore, researchers at a large comprehensive university conducted several rounds of web searching before and after the creation and modification of faculty authority records. The sample consisted of 24 faculty and the 35 publications associated with their authorities. The researchers searched for the faculty and their publications on the social networking and identity websites directly, and then used Google, Bing, and Google Scholar to record which of the faculty members’ profiles and publications were found within the top 50 results. Faculty with more profiles were more visible in search engine results, and faculty with authority records ranked more highly in Google. Results related to publication discovery and ranking were more inconclusive, but revealed clear differences between search tools. The implications of this exploratory research can support educational efforts about academic identities and scholarly profiles, begin a research agenda, and inform methodological development surrounding the influence of identity records and academic social networking profiles on web visibility.     

The potential of using the Google Scholar search engine for estimating the publication activities of universities

This paper studies the potential of using the Google Scholar search engine for estimating the publication activities of universities and considers a procedure for such estimation with the help of queries for the English names of universities. The publication structures for 2008 have been built for ten selected universities of the world, including MSU. The publication activities of the universities under consideration in 2007, has been compared based on the citation database of the US Institute for Scientific Information (Web of Knowledge) and Google Scholar search engine (GS-publications).     

Invoking “collective memory”: mapping the emergence of a concept in archival science

The concept of “collective” or “social” memory has assumed increasing prominence in the discourse of archivists over the past few decades. Archives are frequently characterized as crucial institutions of social memory, and many professional activities are considered forms of memory preservation. We present a systematic examination of the relationships between archives and collective memory as articulated in the English-language archival literature. We first identify the major themes regarding collective memory and categorize archival writings into four major threads. We then analyze citations extracted from 165 articles about collective memory published between 1980 and 2010 in four leading English-language archival studies journals. We identify the most influential scholars and publications and trace the evolution of the collective memory concept in that literature. By comparing the archival literature on collective memory to that indexed in Thomson’s Web of Science and in Google Scholar, we identify specific disciplines, authors, and works that archivists working on collective memory may find useful. We find that in general the archival literature on collective memory is fairly insular and self-referential and call on archivists to actively engage other disciplines when carrying out collective memory research.     

Google Scholar Usage: An Academic Library's Experience

Google Scholar is a free service that provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly works and to connect patrons with the resources libraries provide. The researchers in this study analyzed Google Scholar usage data from 2006 for three library tools at San Francisco State University: SFX link resolver, Web Access Management proxy server, and ILLiad interlibrary loan server. Overall, the data suggested that Google Scholar had become a very useful resource in the library and was a significant addition to the library's collection of research databases. SFX data revealed requests from Google Scholar grew ten-fold from 2006 to 2011, and that Google Scholar became the top-ranked SFX source for requests in 2011. Library patrons favored Google Scholar over San Francisco State University's federated search tool, MetaLib, and it has become an important source for interlibrary loan requests. Analysis of San Francisco State University usage data will assist other libraries in their decisions about the implementation of Google Scholar.     

Publication and citation patterns among LIS faculty: Profiling a “typical professor”

Research on publication and citation patterns generally focuses on prolific or highly cited authors or on highly ranked programs. This study investigates the work and influence of a cross-section of library and information science (LIS) researchers at various stages of their academic lives, using a random sample of faculty members at programs accredited by the American Library Association. The analysis shows that the number of publications increases steadily as faculty rank advances. Assistant professors publish more conference papers and fewer journal articles, a pattern that is reversed with associate and full professors. Researchers used Web of Science® and Google™ Scholar to determine the influence of the publications. Web of Science reported no citations for most LIS faculty publications. With its broader scope, Google Scholar located more citations and revealed that the works of professors are cited significantly more frequently than publications by assistant or associate professors. When faculty profiles are compared by type of program, faculty members at schools granting doctoral degrees publish significantly more than their counterparts at schools where there is no doctoral program or where the doctoral degree is offered jointly with other academic units. When the comparison is made across ranks, full professors publish significantly more than faculty members at other ranks. There is no significant difference between assistant and associate professors.     

A Student Perspective on e-Resource Discovery: Has the Google Factor Changed Publisher Platform Searching Forever?

The literature shows that students are more likely to begin their search via Google, as it is perceived to be easier and more accessible than other databases or publisher platforms. The invisible web, specifically publisher platforms, is sometimes too difficult for students to access; there are also suggestions that Google Scholar in particular may outperform other paid-for databases. The ease of access and the somewhat misguided notion that Google Scholar has more reliable information than that provided by libraries makes search engines all the more attractive. This culture of searching using a single search box is reflected in the increase in the number of libraries opting for single resource discovery systems such as Summon or Primo, which use a single search covering all the library holdings. The findings suggest that whilst Google Scholar can perform well in some circumstances, it performed only moderately well when compared with LISTA and Summon – the single resource discovery system tested. It was the least successful resource in terms of precision when compared with LISTA, Summon, Emerald and Sage. However, the simplicity of search engines begs the question: will databases and publisher platforms become obsolete? The study concludes that subject specific databases are more effective than search engines, but the complexity of accessing the invisible web is hindering their popularity.     

Some measures for comparing citation databases

Citation analysis was traditionally based on data from the ISI Citation indexes. Now with the appearance of Scopus, and with the free citation tool Google Scholar methods and measures are need for comparing these tools. In this paper we propose a set of measures for computing the similarity between rankings induced by ordering the retrieved publications in decreasing order of the number of citations as reported by the specific tools. The applicability of these measures is demonstrated and the results show high similarities between the rankings of the ISI Web of Science and Scopus and lower similarities between Google Scholar and the other tools.     

Developing and Applying a Protocol for a Systematic Review in the Social Sciences

The article reports on a systematic method of undertaking a literature search on the educational impact of being a young carer (16–24 years old). The search methodology applied and described in detail will be of value to academic librarians and to other education researchers who undertake systematic literature searches. Seven bibliographic databases and Google Scholar were searched between November 2015 and January 2016. Two and three concept search structures were compared, involving 28 search terms plus truncation variants. One hundred and eighty-one relevant articles were retrieved. Sensitivity, precision, and “unique articles retrieved” were used as metrics. Social Care Online and Google Scholar had the greatest sensitivity. As well as meticulous use of AND, OR, and bracket operators, the use of NEAR and NOT operators to increase precision were tested and are recommended as useful tools for conducting systematic searches.     

Can Google Scholar and Mendeley help to assess the scholarly impacts of dissertations?

Dissertations can be the single most important scholarly outputs of junior researchers. Whilst sets of journal articles are often evaluated with the help of citation counts from the Web of Science or Scopus, these do not index dissertations and so their impact is hard to assess. In response, this article introduces a new multistage method to extract Google Scholar citation counts for large collections of dissertations from repositories indexed by Google. The method was used to extract Google Scholar citation counts for 77,884 American doctoral dissertations from 2013 to 2017 via ProQuest, with a precision of over 95%. Some ProQuest dissertations that were dual indexed with other repositories could not be retrieved with ProQuest-specific searches but could be found with Google Scholar searches of the other repositories. The Google Scholar citation counts were then compared with Mendeley reader counts, a known source of scholarly-like impact data. A fifth of the dissertations had at least one citation recorded in Google Scholar and slightly fewer had at least one Mendeley reader. Based on numerical comparisons, the Mendeley reader counts seem to be more useful for impact assessment purposes for dissertations that are less than two years old, whilst Google Scholar citations are more useful for older dissertations, especially in social sciences, arts and humanities. Google Scholar citation counts may reflect a more scholarly type of impact than that of Mendeley reader counts because dissertations attract a substantial minority of their citations from other dissertations. In summary, the new method now makes it possible for research funders, institutions and others to systematically evaluate the impact of dissertations, although additional Google Scholar queries for other online repositories are needed to ensure comprehensive coverage.     

Google Scholar acceptance and use among graduate students: A quantitative study

Adding the external variables of satisfaction and loyalty to Fred Davis' technology acceptance model (TAM), this study examined the extent to which graduate students perceived Google Scholar to be a resource that is useful and easy to use. A survey of 1141 graduate students at the University of Minnesota asked questions exploring their perceptions of Google Scholar as part of their research process. Seventy-five percent of survey participants had used Google Scholar at least once before, and a statistical analysis of the responses found that perceived usefulness, loyalty, and, to a lesser extent, perceived ease of use, were positively and significantly related to the graduate students' intended use of the information resource. This research showed that TAM is an applicable model for predicting graduate student use of Google Scholar, which can help academic librarians seeking to understand graduate student acceptance of new information sources. Additionally, this study provides information about how librarians might best promote Google Scholar and other library resources to graduate students.     

Google Scholar在科技论文学术查新中的作用

Google Scholar是建立在Google搜索引擎上直接面向科研需要的学术资源的网络搜索工具,为广大学术查新工作者提供了极其方便的条件.阐述Google Scholar在科技论文学术查新中的作用,并分析其不足之处,提出了弥补方法.     

Author-level metrics in the new academic profile platforms: The online behaviour of the Bibliometrics community

The new web-based academic communication platforms do not only enable researchers to better advertise their academic outputs, making them more visible than ever before, but they also provide a wide supply of metrics to help authors better understand the impact their work is making. This study has three objectives: a) to analyse the uptake of some of the most popular platforms (Google Scholar Citations, ResearcherID, ResearchGate, Mendeley and Twitter) by a specific scientific community (bibliometrics, scientometrics, informetrics, webometrics, and altmetrics); b) to compare the metrics available from each platform; and c) to determine the meaning of all these new metrics. To do this, the data available in these platforms about a sample of 811 authors (researchers in bibliometrics for whom a public profile Google Scholar Citations was found) were extracted. A total of 31 metrics were analysed. The results show that a high number of the analysed researchers only had a profile in Google Scholar Citations (159), or only in Google Scholar Citations and ResearchGate (142). Lastly, we find two kinds of metrics of online impact. First, metrics related to connectivity (followers), and second, all metrics associated to academic impact. This second group can further be divided into usage metrics (reads, views), and citation metrics. The results suggest that Google Scholar Citations is the source that provides more comprehensive citation-related data, whereas Twitter stands out in connectivity-related metrics.     

Language in Social Science Databases: English Versus Non-English Articles in JSTOR and Scopus

This article examines social science language trends in scholarly communication by looking at JSTOR and Scopus bibliographic data between 1996 and 2012. The results reveal that these two databases contain nearly 90 percent English-language publications. According to our analysis, Scopus continues to add more non-English peer-reviewed content while JSTOR totals are declining. To frame this discussion, the data are considered with reference to larger scholarly communication trends in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. This study will be relevant for librarians who are interested in non-English scholarly publishing and collection development.     

Google Scholar Goes to School: The Presence of Google Scholar on College and University Web Sites

This study measured the degree of Google Scholar adoption within academia by analyzing the frequency of Google Scholar appearances on 948 campus and library Web sites, and by ascertaining the establishment of link resolution between Google Scholar and library resources. Results indicate a positive correlation between the implementation of Google Scholar link resolution and the degree of Google Scholar adoption.     

Standing on the Shoulders of Libraries: A Holistic and Rhetorical Approach to Teaching Google Scholar

ABSTRACT

In order to understand better and explain the practices of Google Scholar, this essay takes a rhetorical and holistic look at the search technology, language, and sociopolitical implications of the Google Scholar interface as well as the connection between Google Scholar and the actions of the Google Corporation. The relationship between Google Scholar and the academic library is also explored. In addition, the essay offers ways to encourage students to undertake this kind of critique in the information literacy classroom.     

网络环境下ACA方法的应用研究

本文利用Google Scholar进行了网络环境下我国图书情报界学者的共被引分析研究,进行了聚类分析和多维尺度分析,并利用Pajek进行了可视化,以期对Google Scholar的文献计量功能有更多深入的了解,并应用到实际的科研活动中。     

Measuring the Quality of Contributions of Saudi Authors to LIS Journals Using Journal Impact Factor (JIF), SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), and Google Scholar Metrics (GSM)

This research study evaluates the quality of articles published by Saudi and expatriate authors in foreign Library and Information Science (LIS) journals using three popular metrics for ranking journals—Journal Impact Factor (JIF), SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), and Google Scholar Metrics (GSM). The reason for using multiple metrics is to see how closely or differently journals are ranked by the three different methods of citation analysis. However, the 2012 JIF list of journals is too small, almost half the size of the SJR and GSM lists, which inhibited one-to-one comparison among the impact factors of the thirty-six journals selected by Saudi authors for publishing articles. Only seventeen journals were found common to all the three lists, limiting the usefulness of the data. A basic problem is that Saudi LIS authors generally lack the level of competency in the English language required to achieve publication in the most prominent LIS journals. The study will have implications for authors, directors, and deans of all types of academic libraries; chairmen and deans of library schools; and the Saudi Library Association. Hopefully these entities will take necessary steps to prepare and motivate both academics and practicing librarians to improve the quality of their research and publications and thus get published in higher ranked journals.     

Discovering Open Access Art History: A Comparative Study of the Indexing of Open Access Art Journals

This article evaluates the indexing of open access art journals in four frequently utilized art indexes: Art Full Text, ARTBibliographies Modern, Art & Architecture Complete, and Bibliography of the History of Art/International Bibliography of Art. The authors also compare the indexing of open access journals in Google Scholar to that in the traditional indexes mentioned above and demonstrate that the commercial indexes currently lag behind Google Scholar in terms of content coverage. This article argues that increased indexing of open access art journals in the traditional, subject-specific indexes will be integral to their acceptance within the discipline of art history.