Do Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science speak your language?

Short summary of white paper on the coverage of non-English language publications in three major databases for citation analysis

Figure 1: Comparing the average h-index of Anglophone and non-Anglophone scholars across three data-bases

The fact that GoogleScholar provides a more comprehensive coverage of publications and citations in the Social Sciences than Scopus or the Web of Science is well-known. My earlier white papers Sacrifice a little accuracy for a lot more comprehensive coverage and From h-index to hIa: The ins and outs of research metrics provide a good overview of this. My latest white paper Do Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science speak your language? looks specifically at the extent to which the different data-bases cover scholarship in languages other than English.

The conclusion is clear: Whereas Google Scholar is decidedly multi-lingual, “speaking” French, German, and Portuguese (as well as many other languages), both the Web of Science and Scopus are much more mono-lingual. As a result - as Figure 1 shows - non-Anglophone research are almost completely invisible in the latter two databases.

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