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Google Scholar as a Citation Database for Non-bibliometric Areas: The EVA Project Results

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The Evaluation of Research in Social Sciences and Humanities

Abstract

In this chapter, we present the EVA (Extraction, Validation, and Analysis) project and related results about the use of Google Scholar as web database for calculation of citation indexes in non-bibliometric scientific areas, such as social sciences and humanities. The results of the EVA project are presented on a case-study about the publication records retrieved from Google Scholar for a dataset of Italian academic researchers belonging to non-bibliometric scientific areas. The evaluation results against the Elsevier-Scopus citation database are also discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The complete name of the area is Antiquities, Philological-Literacy and Historical Artistic Sciences. It has been shortened only for readability. The name of the Italian researcher is irrelevant for the clarity of the example and it is omitted.

  2. 2.

    In this chapter, we call publication p the bibliographic record returned by Google Scholar in response to a query.

  3. 3.

    A detailed description of normalization techniques and related NLP functions is provided in (Manning et al. 2008).

  4. 4.

    The edit distance between two titles’ strings (S1 and S2) is the minimum number of operations (inclusion, substitution or deletion) on single characters needed to transform S1 into S2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Alfio Ferrara & Stefano Montanelli

  2. Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Stefano Verzillo

Authors
  1. Alfio Ferrara
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  2. Stefano Montanelli
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  3. Stefano Verzillo
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Correspondence to Alfio Ferrara .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. DESTEC, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Andrea Bonaccorsi

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Ferrara, A., Montanelli, S., Verzillo, S. (2018). Google Scholar as a Citation Database for Non-bibliometric Areas: The EVA Project Results. In: Bonaccorsi, A. (eds) The Evaluation of Research in Social Sciences and Humanities. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68554-0_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68554-0_12

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