A physician up for promotion and tenure asked if Google Scholar could be used with confidence to see who had been citing him. The gold standard in citation tracking and impact factors...is still the ISI Web of Knowledge (WoK). WoK's strengths are high standards and rigorous content selection. However, it is expensive, accessible to subscribers only and does not track books. Google Scholar tracks books and articles, but its standards are much lower than WoK (ie. duplication of results, and inflated numbers). Librarians and researchers must learn to live with lowered bibligraphic standards brought on by open access. Open access trumps bibliographic control in the new web ecology. I am still waiting to hear whether MEDLINE will do selective indexing of open access sites in 2006. I expect the WoK or Web of Science to follow suit with a similiar announcement this year.
Comment. The answer to the tenure candidate's question has everything to do with the quality of citation tools and almost nothing to do with OA. It may be true today that the priced tool is better than the free tool, but that's contingent and may not last. In any case, the priced tool is selective in its coverage and probably doesn't give all the citations to the tenure candidate's work. OA literature makes citation tracking easier for newcomers to this field, especially those without deep pockets, and we can expect steady improvement in citation harvesting tools for OA literature. But it doesn't follow that as OA literature gains ground, the free tools will surpass the priced tools in quality. Again, this is contingent. First, the priced tools can harvest citations from OA literature as easily as the free tools, if they choose to do so. Second, free tools like Google Scholar also index non-OA sources and over time may or may not do so more comprehensively than the priced tools.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/05/2006 09:19:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
