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Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science: a longitudinal and cross-disciplinary comparison

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Abstract

This article aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive comparison of the coverage of the three major bibliometric databases: Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science. Based on a sample of 146 senior academics in five broad disciplinary areas, we therefore provide both a longitudinal and a cross-disciplinary comparison of the three databases. Our longitudinal comparison of eight data points between 2013 and 2015 shows a consistent and reasonably stable quarterly growth for both publications and citations across the three databases. This suggests that all three databases provide sufficient stability of coverage to be used for more detailed cross-disciplinary comparisons. Our cross-disciplinary comparison of the three databases includes four key research metrics (publications, citations, h-index, and hI, annual, an annualised individual h-index) and five major disciplines (Humanities, Social Sciences, Engineering, Sciences and Life Sciences). We show that both the data source and the specific metrics used change the conclusions that can be drawn from cross-disciplinary comparisons.

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Notes

  1. Two professors in Law and Physics unfortunately had to be removed from the final sample, as their publication patterns were very uncharacteristic of their field. The Law professor (now a Professor at Stanford with a dual appointment in Medicine and Law, and an Honorary Professor in the Medical Faculty at Melbourne) specialised in Health Law and had published mainly in medical journals. His publication pattern (large number of publications and many co-authors) and citation pattern (very high level of citations) was very atypical for the field of Law, which is characteristic by very low citation levels. He was also a Federation Fellow, i.e. a very high performing academic. Including him in the Humanities sample would have completely changed our results; in the Web of Science he had four times as many citations on his own as all of the 19 other Humanities academics combined. The Physics professor was a Particle Physicist. Many of her publications had more than a thousand authors. As a result her publication and citation metrics far exceeded that of any of the other academics in our sample, thus distorting any comparisons. Moreover, as the number of co-authors resulted in very large datafiles, we experienced problems in exporting the data from Scopus for this author as well as difficulties in importing the WoS datafiles into Publish or Perish, thus making data collection impossible in some months. Unfortunately, by the time we realised these problems, it was too late to select a replacement.

  2. This obviously begs the question why we didn’t use the WoS Cited Reference search or the Scopus secondary documents in our comparison. For a comprehensive review of the many reasons why this is not a feasible option, please see Harzing (2013, pp. 1064–1065).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Middlesex University, The Burroughs, Hendon, London, NW4 4BT, UK

    Anne-Wil Harzing

  2. University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus, Parkville, VIC, 3010, Australia

    Satu Alakangas

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  1. Anne-Wil Harzing
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  2. Satu Alakangas
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Correspondence to Anne-Wil Harzing.

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Harzing, AW., Alakangas, S. Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science: a longitudinal and cross-disciplinary comparison. Scientometrics 106, 787–804 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1798-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1798-9

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