An Evaluation of Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar Citations in Operations Management
Abstract
Purpose: Ongoing deliberation about how research productivity should be measured is exacerbated by extensive disparity between the number of citations for scholarly works reported by commercial academic search engines and Google Scholar (GS), the premier web crawling service for discovering research citations. Disparities identified in citation comparison studies have also led to disagreement about the value of the higher number of citations for social sciences and business scholarly articles consistently reported by GS. The purpose of this paper is to extend previous database citation comparison studies by manually analyzing a sample of unique GS citations to a leading operations management journal (i.e. citations found only in GS and not the commercial search engines) to reveal just where these additional citations are coming from. Design/methodology/approach: In addition to comparing citation counts for the three databases, unique GS citation data for the sample of journal articles was manually captured and reviewed. The authors’ approach provides a much more in-depth examination of the provenance of GS citations than is found in previous studies. Findings: The findings suggest that concerns about the value of unique GS citations may not be warranted since the document types for the unique GS citing documents identified in the analysis are dominated by familiar scholarly formats. Predominantly authentic and validated journal publications, dissertations, conference papers, and book and book chapters accounted for the large majority of the unique GS citations analyzed. Practical implications: The study lends further credence to contentions that the use of citations reported in GS is appropriate for evaluating research impact in disciplines where other formats beyond the English-language journal article are valued. Originality/value: Developing a more informed understanding of the provenance of unique GS citations in the authors’ field is important because many scholars not only aspire to publish in elite journals with high impact factors based on citation counts provided by commercial databases to demonstrate quality, but also report the larger number of citations for their publications that are reported by GS to demonstrate impact. The in-depth manual analysis suggests that GS provides a more nuanced and comprehensive representation of research impact and international scope than the commercial databases.
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WoS and Scopus data are questionable for Social Sciences & Humanities because these disciplines are clearly underrepresented in the DBs.
“The same can be said about the use of WoS and Scopus data in Social Sciences & Humanities, since these disciplines are clearly underrepresented in the DBs [5,44,47,88,91,163,263].”
From Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World (2021) · cites this paper as [91]
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- Authors
- Chapman, K., & Ellinger, A. E.
- Affiliations
- University of Alabama (US)
- Venue
- The International Journal of Logistics Management
- Publisher
- Emerald
- Published
- 2019-11-11
- Volume
- 30
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1039-1053
- ISSN
- 0957-4093 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2973834436
- Cited by
- 55
- References
- 29
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 1
- FWCI
- 3.86
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- The International Journal of Logistics Management (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Web visibility and informetrics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Psychology Research and Bibliometrics
- Keywords
- Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, citation counts, research impact assessment, operations management, academic search engines, research productivity measurement
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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