2015 Google Scholar Metrics released: analyzing the new edition

[Stephen J Bensman]

Emilio,
Thank you very much for this information and analysis.  You sure do have a handle on this stuff.  I learn a lot from you.  I will look at it and may even cite your opinion on this, since you and I seem to be going the same direction on this thing.

Respectfully--very,
Stephen J. Bensman, Ph.D.
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA

________________________________________
From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics <SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU> on behalf of Emilio Delgado López-Cózar <edelgado at UGR.ES>
Sent: Monday, June 29, 2015 2:45 AM
To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
Subject: [SIGMETRICS] 2015 Google Scholar Metrics released: analyzing the new edition


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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