An Exploration of Mendeley Reader and Google Scholar Citation for Analysing Indexed Article

Abstract— This paper aims to analyze the number of readers from the published articles of 100 Indonesian researchers in Mendeley reference management software. The list of Indonesian scientists is obtained from the webometrics ranking of scientists. We used the Application Programming Interface (API) of Mendeley to count the number of readers for each article in Mendeley and combine it with Google Scholar citation using the scrap method. We processed ten mostly cited articles that are indexed in the first page of the Google Scholar for each designated scientist. Furthermore, we used the Pearson method to analyze the correlation of the Mendeley readers count and the Google Scholar citation. The results show that they are correlated with a value of 0.266 according to the method of Pearson with N = 1000. Furthermore we found that many online Indonesian journals have no Digital Object Identifier (DOI) yet. Our evaluation of the publication results of 100 Indonesian researchers shows that authors who upload their scientific work on Mendeley, have higher citation number in Google Scholar, because their papers are widely available on the Internet.

Could There Be Some Viable Challengers to Google Scholar on the Horizon? | Absolutely Maybe

by Hilda Bastian

In 2019, I wrote a pair of posts about the risks of our reliance on Google Scholar (GS), and search engine alternatives for systematic reviewers. Back then, a thorough assessment of 28 searchable collections of academic records found only 2 that were large enough to come anywhere close to GS’ scope – the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) and WorldWideScience (WWS). And of those, only Microsoft indexed citations so you could search those as well. What’s more, MAG’s corpus was open, so you could download results – which you can’t in GS – or even the whole lot to use in creating something else.

But Microsoft canned Academic Search at the end of 2021. The exercise may have largely been a testing ground for the company’s “AI” search aspirations. Now it’s started a chatbot-driven arms race between its search engine, Bing, and Google. Meanwhile, Google’s cutting jobs and their search engine already seemed to be circling the drain, over-stuffed with ads and Google-surfaced content. It’s even easier to picture GS joining the long list of products scrapped by Google.

I rely on GS on a lot, and all the talk of threats to Google financial standing is making me nervous. So it was definitely time to see whether there are any viable, free-to-use, alternatives spanning all fields now – or even on the distant horizon. And I’ve ended up a lot more relieved – even optimistic – than I expected to be!

[…]

 

Recalibrating the Scope of Scholarly Publishing: A Modest Step in a Vast Decolonization Process | Quantitative Science Studies | MIT Press

Abstract:  By analyzing 25,671 journals largely absent from common journal counts, as well as Web of Science and Scopus, this study demonstrates that scholarly communication is more of a global endeavor than is commonly credited. These journals, employing the open source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS), have published 5.8 million items; they are in 136 countries, with 79.9% in the Global South and 84.2% following the OA diamond model (charging neither reader nor author). A substantial proportion of journals operate in more than one language (48.3%), with research published in a total of 60 languages (led by English, Indonesian, Spanish, and Portuguese). The journals are distributed across the social sciences (45.9%), STEM (40.3%), and the humanities (13.8%). For all their geographic, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity, 1.2% are indexed in the Web of Science and 5.7% in Scopus. On the other hand, 1.0% are found in Cabells Predatory Reports, while 1.4% show up in Beall’s questionable list. This paper seeks to both contribute and historically situate expanded scale and diversity of scholarly publishing in the hope that this recognition may assist humankind in taking full advantage of what is increasingly a global research enterprise.

 

Google Scholar – Platforming the Scholarly Economy | Internet Policy Review

Abstract:  Google Scholar has become an important player in the scholarly economy. Whereas typical academic publishers sell bibliometrics, analytics and ranking products, Alphabet, through Google Scholar, provides “free” tools for academic search and scholarly evaluation that have made it central to academic practice. Leveraging political imperatives for open access publishing, Google Scholar has managed to intermediate data flows between researchers, research managers and repositories, and built its system of citation counting into a unit of value that coordinates the scholarly economy. At the same time, Google Scholar’s user-friendly but opaque tools undermine certain academic norms, especially around academic autonomy and the academy’s capacity to understand how it evaluates itself.

 

5 ways Google Scholar helps you get access to what you discovered | Aaron Tay’s Musings about librarianship

“If there is one academic discovery search that dominates it is Google Scholar.

Much has been said about it’s merits , particularly over library discovery systems but even the best discovery service will not be popular if it does not help the user access the full text whether open access or based on the user’s own unique circumstances (typically institutional affiliation).

In this blog post, I will list 5 different ways Google Scholar helps a user get to full text. The last two were methods I recently discovered and it seems may not be very well known even by academic librarians.

They are 

1. Free full text tagged [PDF] or [HTML]

2. Library Links programme

3. Library search via Open WorldCat Search

4. The print/or non-electronic holdings option…

5. Subscriber links programme …”

Opinion: Pros and Cons of Google vs. Subscription Databases

“During my time overseeing the library services department of a large school district, we found our subscription databases were generally a well-kept secret. The lack of trained school librarians available to teach these resources was part of the issue. But Google was ubiquitous, as was Wikipedia, and they became de facto research sources for students, despite their limitations for such a role.

Google has its place for students and researchers (I used it for this article), as does Google Scholar (which I also used). But for students, subscription databases should also play a central research role, beginning with age-appropriate sources for elementary kids – like National Geographic – and moving up to “Gale in Context” for middle school students, and more scholarly articles for high schoolers from sources like ABC-CLIO….”

 

TRANSPARENT RANKING: All Repositories (August 2021) | Ranking Web of Repositories

During the last months, we realized the indexing of records of several open access repositories by Google Scholar is not as complete as previously without a clear reason. From the experience of a few cases, it looks that GS penalizes error in the metadata descriptions, so it is important to the affected repositories to check their level of indexing and to try to identify potential problems. Please, consider the following Indexing GS guidelines https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html https://www.or2015.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/or-2015-anurag-google-scholar.pdf and the following material: Exposing Repository Content to Google Scholar A few suggestions for improving the web visibility of the contents of your institutional OA repository “Altmetrics of the Open Access Institutional Repositories: A Webometrics Approach” As a service for the OA community we are providing five lists of repositories (all (institutional+subject), institutional, portals, data, and CRIS) with the raw numbers of records in GS for their web domains (site:xxx.yyy.zz excluding citations and patents) ranked by decreasing number of items as collected during the second week of AUGUST 2021. The list is still incomplete as we are still adding new repositories.

Google Scholar Blog: 2021 Scholar Metrics Released

“Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Today, we are releasing the 2021 version of Scholar Metrics. This release covers articles published in 2016–2020 and includes citations from all articles that were indexed in Google Scholar as of July 2020….”

Google Scholar – Public Access Tracker, Open Access, and eScholarship – Library Matters

“A few months ago, Google Scholar launched a Public Access Tracker. This is a tool embedded in Google Scholar profiles that shows if a researcher’s work is compliant with their funding agencies’ open access mandates: …

A few things to note:

Not every source is picked up

i.e. Researchers may have made works open but Google Scholar didn’t find it.

Not all funded research is captured
Uploading a PDF to your Google Drive (as Google recommends) would NOT meet open access requirements of funding agencies.
Some of the sources Google Scholar recognizes as ‘open’ are not in fact (e.g. ResearchGate). 

 

Although the tracker is not without its bugs (see above), it has spurred some researchers to make more of their work open access….”

Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus: Which is best for me? | Impact of Social Sciences

“Being able to find, assess and place new research within a field of knowledge, is integral to any research project. For social scientists this process is increasingly likely to take place on Google Scholar, closely followed by traditional scholarly databases. In this post, Alberto Martín-Martín, Enrique Orduna-Malea , Mike Thelwall, Emilio Delgado-López-Cózar, analyse the relative coverage of the three main research databases, Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus, finding significant divergences in the social sciences and humanities and suggest that researchers face a trade-off when using different databases: between more comprehensive, but disorderly systems and orderly, but limited systems….”

A fairer way to compare researchers at any career stage and in any discipline using open-access citation data

Abstract:  The pursuit of simple, yet fair, unbiased, and objective measures of researcher performance has occupied bibliometricians and the research community as a whole for decades. However, despite the diversity of available metrics, most are either complex to calculate or not readily applied in the most common assessment exercises (e.g., grant assessment, job applications). The ubiquity of metrics like the h-index (h papers with at least h citations) and its time-corrected variant, the m-quotient (h-index ÷ number of years publishing) therefore reflect the ease of use rather than their capacity to differentiate researchers fairly among disciplines, career stage, or gender. We address this problem here by defining an easily calculated index based on publicly available citation data (Google Scholar) that corrects for most biases and allows assessors to compare researchers at any stage of their career and from any discipline on the same scale. Our ??-index violates fewer statistical assumptions relative to other metrics when comparing groups of researchers, and can be easily modified to remove inherent gender biases in citation data. We demonstrate the utility of the ??-index using a sample of 480 researchers with Google Scholar profiles, stratified evenly into eight disciplines (archaeology, chemistry, ecology, evolution and development, geology, microbiology, ophthalmology, palaeontology), three career stages (early, mid-, late-career), and two genders. We advocate the use of the??-index whenever assessors must compare research performance among researchers of different backgrounds, but emphasise that no single index should be used exclusively to rank researcher capability.