An exploratory study of Google Scholar

Abstract

The paper discusses and analyzes the scientific search service Google Scholar (GS). The focus is on an exploratory study which investigates the coverage of scientific serials in GS. The study shows deficiencies in the coverage and up-to-dateness of the GS index. Furthermore, the study points up which Web servers are the most important data providers for this search service and which information sources are highly represented. We can show that there is a relatively large gap in Google Scholars coverage of German literature as well as weaknesses in the accessibility of Open Access content. Keywords: Search engines, Digital libraries, Worldwide Web, Serials, Electronic journals

16 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Exploring the academic invisible web
• Scientific impact quantity and quality: Analysis of two sources of bibliographic data
• Google Web APIs - an Instrument for Webometric Analyses?

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• The Journal Coverage of Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions: A Comparative Analysis
• ResearchGate and Google Scholar: How much do they differ in publications, citations and different metrics and why?
• Are there too many uncited articles? Zero inflated variants of the discretised lognormal and hooked power law distributions
• A review of the literature on citation impact indicators
• A new methodology for comparing Google Scholar and Scopus
• Google Scholar as a tool for discovering journal articles in library and information science