The Spanish Library and Information Science according to Google Scholar Citations

Following the research line the EC3 Research Group initiated to discover the inner depths of Google Scholar and test its suitability as a tool for research evaluation, this time we have turned our efforts to investigate new uses for Google Scholar Citations (sometimes also known as Google Scholar Profiles). We present a new and original procedure to learn about the impact of a whole scientific discipline (in this case, Library and Information Science), a specific scientific and professional community (the Spanish community), and the main agents that are a part of it (scientists, professionals, the documents they produce, and the journals and publishers which print these documents). This is where the originality of this initiative lies: from the scientific production of the members of the Library and Information Science community who have made public their profile on Google Scholar Citations, we can develop a very reliable picture of this discipline.

The main goals of this product are three:

1. To test the exhaustiveness, reliability and validity of the information available in Google Scholar Citations when applied to the task of creating a bibliometric picture of a given discipline.
2. To test the suitability of Google Scholar Citations for developing rankings that present the main authors, documents, journals and publishers in the Spanish Library and Information Science.
3. To test new ways to build scientific rankings and classifications, using citations counts provided by Google Scholar.

The experimental nature of this action is also aimed at verifying the degree of acceptance of products of this kind in the Humanities and Social Sciences communities, which are not as of yet familiar with this sort of bibliometric practices. And the best way to do this is to display the results obtained in each area of study in order to analyze and assess the reactions that these products may provoke.

From the ranking of 336 Spanish Library and Information Science authors who have made their Google Scholar Citations profile public, and the 485 most cited documents in those profiles (90^th percentile), three additional rankings have been developed: a journal ranking, a publisher ranking, and an institution ranking according to the number of citations received.

The product is accessible from:

http://biblioteconomia-documentacion-española.infoec3.es

Google Scholar Citations in figures

In a post published by José Luis Ortega in his new blog The Scientific Web Observer, he presents some updated figures on Google Scholar Citations. We extend our warmest regards and wish the best of luck to him in this new and interesing endeavor.

Google Scholar Citations, also known as Google Scholar Profiles was released as a restricted beta on the 20th of July,2011, and eventually opened to the general public on the 16th of November, 2011, with the goal of:

• Enabling scientific authors to create a bibliographic profile containing all their publications, and making it available to search engines.
• Allowing researchers to follow and be followed by other researchers, receiving automatic alerts when those researchers add new publications as well as when your research is cited.
• Automatically generating some basic bibliometric indicators.

Google Scholar Citations, which received a face-lift during the last summer (introducing some new features), contained a total of 596,105 profiles as of January 2015, twice the number of profiles it contained in 2014 (296,205). The United States is the country with a higher number of researcher profiles (112,899), followed by the United Kingdom. The case of Brazil should also be highlighted, since the position it ocupies in the ranking according to the number of profiles is much higher than its global scientific weight. As a matter of fact, the institution with the highest number of profiles is the Universidade de Sao Paulo (6155).

To obtain a more detailed information, we recommend you visit : http://swobserver.blogspot.com.es

Publishers Scholar Metrics: ranking of scientific publishers in Spain according to Google Scholar

EC3 Research Group has released Publishers Scholar Metrics, a bibliometric index which aims to measure the impact of scientific books publishers by analyzing citations to monographs published by professors and researchers of Spanish public universities in the Humanities and the Social Sciences and indexed on Google Scholar in 2012 (when the data was collected).

The two main objectives of this product are:

·         To determine the reliability and validity of the information provided by Google Scholar in order to detect the core of scientific publishers with a higher influence in the various disciplines that conform the Humanities and the Social Sciences.

·         To verify the suitability of Google Scholar as a tool for retrieving the scientific output of researchers in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, since their work is seldom covered in traditional databases because of their peculiar publication habits.

The experimental nature of this action is also aimed at verifying the degree of acceptance of products of this kind in the Humanities and Social Sciences communities, which are not as of yet familiar with this sort of bibliometric practices. And the best way to do this is to display the results obtained in each area of study in order to analyze and assess the reactions.

These publisher rankings have been manufactured from a sample containing the 7,203 most cited books of those published by 40,993 Spanish researchers and indexed on Google Scholar. These books have received a total of 417,153 citations. The rankings are presented by scientific disciplines and specializations to which Spanish university professors are ascribed to.

The product is accessible from:

http://www.publishers-scholarmetrics.info

Top 100 most cited publishers