Is Google Scholar flawless? Of course not!

Reviews the major limitations of Google Scholar

Anne-Wil Harzing - Sun 1 Oct 2017 13:34 (updated Sun 2 Apr 2023 07:54)

Ok, I know I have been quite an advocate of Google Scholar. As I have argued in the past, Google Scholar and Publish or Perish have played a major role in democratising citation analysis. Rather than leaving it in the hands of those with access to commercial data-bases with high subscription fees, everyone with a computer and internet access can now run their own analyses. If you'd like to know more about this, have a look at this presentation.

Google Scholar Quirks

Does this mean I think Google Scholar is flawless? Of course not! Quite apart from its secrecy in terms of coverage and its oftentimes lack of response to support requests, there are quite a range of Google Scholar Quirks that are analysed in detail in my Publish or Perish tutorial.

• Google Scholar: Truncation
• Google Scholar: Wrong master record
• Google Scholar: Wrong author(s)
• Google Scholar: Inconsistent year
• Google Scholar: Stray citations
• Google Scholar: Book edition cites
• Google Scholar: Missing subject areas
• Google Scholar: Citation years
• Google Scholar: Slow searches
• Google Scholar: CAPTCHAS

Watch an interview on the Publish or Perish software

Background reading

• Harzing, A.W.; Wal, R. van der (2008) Google Scholar as a new source for citation analysis?, Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 61-73. Available online... - Publisher's version (free access!)
• Harzing, A.W.; Wal, R. van der (2009) A Google Scholar h-index for journals: An alternative metric to measure journal impact in Economics & Business?, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, vol. 60, no. 1, pp 41-46. Available online... - ESI top 1% most Highly Cited Paper
• Harzing, A.W. (2013) A preliminary test of Google Scholar as a source for citation data: A longitudinal study of Nobel Prize winners, Scientometrics, vol. 93, no. 3, pp. 1057-1075. Available online... - Publisher's version (read for free) - ESI top 1% most Highly Cited Paper
• Harzing, A.W. (2013) Document categories in the ISI Web of Knowledge: Misunderstanding the Social Sciences?, Scientometrics, 93(1): 23-34. Available online... - Publisher’s version
• Harzing, A.W. (2014) A longitudinal study of Google Scholar coverage between 2012 and 2013, Scientometrics, vol. 98, no. 1, pp. 565-575. Available online... - Publisher's version (read for free) - ESI top 1% most Highly Cited Paper
• Harzing, A.W. (2015) Health warning: Might contain multiple personalities. The problem of homonyms in Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators, Scientometrics, vol. 105, no. 3, pp. 2259-2270. Available online... - Publisher's version (read for free) - [Press coverage in The Times and the Times Higher Education].
• Harzing, A.W. (2017) Publish or Perish: Realising Google Scholar's potential to democratise citation analysis, presented at the Google Scholar day, Madrid, 20 February 2017. Available online...
• Harzing, A.W.; Alakangas, S. (2016) Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science: A longitudinal and cross-disciplinary comparison, Scientometrics, vol. 106, no. 2, pp. 787-804. Available online... - Publisher's version (read for free) - Presentation slides - Video presentation of this article - ESI top 1% most Highly Cited Paper - ESI hot paper
• Harzing, A.W.; Adler N.J. (2016) Disseminating knowledge: From potential to reality – New open-access journals collide with convention, Academy of Management Learning & Education, vol 15, no. 1, pp. 140-156. Available online... - Publisher's version

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