Google Scholar and ICite indicators

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a search engine dedicated to academic literature, including peer-reviewed journal articles, theses, dissertations, preprints, books, abstracts, and more. Differently from Scopus and WoS, it is not based on a specific “source database”. Therefore, citation analysis is conducted on literature cominng directly from the web through Google’s data mining process.

Regarding citation analysis, this comes with advantages and limitations when it comes to citation analysis.

Benefits:

• Open access

• Speed

• Usually, more documents citing a work than when using Scopus and WoS databases, as Scholar indexes more journals and document types than citation databases

• A content universe almost without limits, as anything cited by another work on the web can be found in Scholar. Information on content retrieval can be found here

Limitations:

• No author standardization: all the variations of a name must be searched to find all works by the same author

• Anything cited by another article may be included in the “Cited list”, even if it is not regarded asacademic publications. To check if a journal is peer-reviewed, the title can be checked in the Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory database to find out if the title is indicated as “refereed”. 

• Nei rSearch results may include multiple versions of the same article, so the parameter “times cited” may include duplicates

• Citation analysis in Scholar is basic, and limiting searches to only publications by a specific author is complicated

When authors create and associate a profile in Google Scholar with their publications identified semi-automatically by Scholar, they receive a list of their publications and an analysis of citations received. Bibliometric data appears alongside the profile for each publication of the researcher, with the expression “Cited by” followed by the total citations scanned by Google's academic search engine.

On top of the total citation count, Google Scholar presents the author’s Hirsch index and H5 Index.

An author name or an article title can be search to find metrics regarding the author or article. Author metrics are only calculated if an author profile is created and publications are associated to it (through a semi-automatic process).

References:

• https://guides.lib.umich.edu/citation

• https://www.unipa.it/biblioteche/fare-ricerca/bibliometria/indicatori-bibliometrici/indicatori-altri-db

iCITE-PUBMED

iCite-Pubmed focuses only on the fields of medicine and biology. It generates bibliometric for articles with a PMID identifier from the PubMed database.

Indicator: Relative Citation Ratio (RCR)

RCR is a new metric promoted by the National Institute of Health (NIH), that is normalized by disciplinary field and only applicable to the fields of medicine and biology. It monitors the quality of research funded by the NIH and is managed with an iCite tool that generates bibliometric from individual articles searched with a PMID identifier.  

You can add up to 1,000 PMIDs and view citations per article and their annual distribution: so RCR is a metric that works at an article level with a PubMed ID identifier

Surkis A, Spore S. The relative citation ratio: what is it and why should medical librarians care?. J Med Libr Assoc. 2018;106(4):508-513. doi: 10.5195/jmla.2018.499

Hutchins BI, Yuan X, Anderson JM, Santangelo GM (2016) Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level. PLOS Biology 14(9): e1002541. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002541