Tracking Scholarly Publishing of Hospitals Using MEDLINE, Scopus, WoS and Google Scholar

Pylarinou, S., & Kapidakis, S. (2017). 
Tracking Scholarly Publishing of Hospitals Using MEDLINE, Scopus, WoS and Google Scholar. 
Journal of Hospital Librarianship, 17(3), 209-216. 
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15323269.2017.1332934

Scientific literature focuses on facilitating communication among researchers. Many studies have been conducted to compare effectiveness, coverage, and performance among databases available to researchers and/or librarians. In this study, the authors compared MEDLINE/PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science (WoS), and Google Scholar performance regarding searching for scholarly publishing of institutions such as hospitals. 

Query searches of scholarly publications of specific hospital personnel run and articles results were compared.  The MEDLINE/PubMed database, Scopus and Web of Science offer the option to search by affiliation. Affiliations in Google Scholar can be searched by running a query as an exact phrase. Queries were phrased in a way that was suitable for each source as well as to enable comparison. To facilitate comparison we limited research to 2016. Data were collected at the end of August 2016.

Natural language use when authors denote affiliation affects retrieval of scholarly publishing. Effectiveness of searching scholarly publishing of a specific institution is better served when there is concurrent use of many databases.

An affiliation-based search could be better served if searchers use multiple sources in combination. In this study, a comparison of bibliographic database results gave precedence to MEDLINE/PubMed. Between free available resources MEDLINE/PubMed and Google Scholar, MEDLINE/PubMed provided better results also.