4.3.4 Searching for journal titles that include common words

Although Google Scholar provides good results for most journal titles, journal titles that include common words provide some difficulties.

The journal impact analysis uses the Google Scholar Advanced query "return articles published in". Google Scholar interprets this query broadly and returns matches for both the publication and the publisher.

This means that a search for a relatively generic journal title such as Information Systems Research might get additional matches in the publisher field, such as Center for Information Systems Research, or even the eventual co-sponsor/co-publisher of MIS Quarterly (Management Information Systems Research Center, University of Minnesota), even though this is not directly visible in the Google Scholar output.

As a result most hits for a citation analysis for the journal Information Systems Research would be papers published in MIS Quarterly, which on average tend to be more highly cited than papers in Information Systems Research. Including MIS Quarterly in the Exclude these words field is not an option, because Google Scholar matches the exclusion words anywhere in the paper and would therefore also exclude any papers in Information Systems Research that merely refer to papers published in MIS Quarterly (which is likely to be the case for a very substantial number of papers).

One of the two following strategies is recommended to calculate the citation impact in this and similar cases:

1. Search for Information Systems Research without any exclusions.
2. Sort the results by Publication.
3. Unselect all papers.
4. Manually selected all papers published in Information Systems Research and click Check selection.

This is probably the fastest option, but might not provide completely accurate results in cases where there are a lot of false hits. Since Google Scholar limits the total number of results to 1000, the false hits might suppress some papers of the journal of interest that are not as highly cited.

This is most likely to be a problem in disciplines where papers are generally highly cited (e.g. medicine), but it might make a difference for other fields as well. Citations metrics such as the total number of citations and citations per paper are more sensitive to different search strategies than citation metrics such as the h-index, which will generally not be influenced by this.

The second strategy safely eliminates false hits and hence provides a more accurate result:

1. Search for Information Systems Research, but include the ISSN of MIS Quarterly (0276-7783) in the Exclude these words field. This prevents Google Scholar from excluding all ISR papers that include a MISQ reference in their list of references, but still excludes the many MIS Quarterly hits. Additional exclusions are possible, as long as they are unique enough to not be likely to appear anywhere in papers published in ISR.
2. Sort the results by Publication.
3. Unselect all papers.
4. Manually selected all papers published in Information Systems Research and click Check selection.