2015 Google Scholar Metrics released: analyzing the new edition

[Emilio Delgado López-Cózar]

Dear colleagues, 2015 Google Scholar Metrics  has been released in 
June, 25th 2015. This new edition (fourth) is marked by continuity. 
There is nothing new, other than the updating of the time frame 
(2010-2014). The total number of publications that can be visualized in 
the 2015 rankings is 5,450.

It provides lists of publications according to the language their 
documents are written in. For all of them, except for English 
publications (these are a total of 8: Chinese, Portuguese, German, 
Spanish, French, Japanese, Dutch, and Italian) it offers lists of only 
100 titles: those with the higher h index. For English publications, 
however, it shows a total of 4650 different publications, grouped in 8 
subject areas and 261 disciplines. For each publication, it shows the 
titles of the documents whose citations contribute to the h index, and 
for each one of these documents, in turn, the titles of the documents 
that cite them. For other journals indexed, it provides a search feature 
that, for any given set of keywords, will retrieve a list of 20 
publications whose titles contain the selected keywords. In the cases 
where there are more than 20 publications that satisfy the query, only 
the first 20 results, those with a higher h index, will be displayed.

Google has just updated the data, which means that some of the 
limitations discussed in previous studies still persist. GSM is a 
minimalist information product with few features, closed (it cannot be 
customized by the user), and simple (navigating it only takes a few 
clicks). For these reasons, we consider it a “low cost” bibliometric 
tool, and propose a list of features it should incorporate in order to 
stop being labeled as such.

http://googlescholardigest.blogspot.com.es/2015/06/google-scholar-metrics-2015-happy.html

Notwithstanding the above, this product presents a stability in its 
bibliometric indicators that supports its ability to measure the impact 
of scientific journals.

Thank you, and I hope you find it of interest.

Emilio Delgado López-Cózar
EC3 Research Group: Evaluación de la Ciencia y de la Comunicación 
Científica
Facultad de Comunicación y Documentación
Universidad de Granada
http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=es&user=kyTHOh0AAAAJ

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