[Sigmetrics] Bibliometrics & bibliometricians in Google Scholar Citations and ResearcherID, ResearchGate, Mendeley, Twitter

[Emilio Delgado López-Cózar]

In keeping with the research line the EC3 Research Group began several 
years ago aimed at unravelling the inner depths of Google Scholar and 
testing its capabilities as a tool for scientific evaluation, this time 
we have turned our efforts to finding new uses for Google Scholar 
Citations (GSC). Based on the information available on every GSC public 
profile, a procedure has been developed to collect data from the 
scientists working on a given field of study, and to aggregate that data 
in order to present metrics at various levels: authors, documents, 
journals, and book publishers. Thus, GSC data would presumably allow us 
to present a picture of the history and scientific communication 
patterns of a discipline. In order to explore the feasibility of this 
project, we decided to select the field of Bibliometrics, 
Scientometrics, Informetrics, Webometrics, and Altmetrics as our test 
subject.

Once we’ve seen the picture of the discipline that can be observed 
through the data available in GSC, we also want to compare it to its 
counterparts in other academic web services, like ResearcherID, a 
researcher identification system launched by Thomson Reuters, mainly 
built upon data from Web of Science (which has been and still is the 
go-to source for many researchers in the field of research evaluation), 
and other profiling services which have arisen in the wake of the Web 
2.0 movement: ResearchGate, an academic social network, and Mendeley, a 
social reference manager which also offers profiling features. These are 
the most widely known tools worldwide for academic profiling . In 
addition, we also include the links to the authors' homepages (the first 
tool researchers used to showcase their scientific activities on the 
Web), and Twitter, the popular microblogging site, in order to learn how 
much presence bibliometricians have in this platform and the kind of 
communication activities in which they take part there.

28 different indicators from 813 authors are displayed. The data is 
presented "as is": no filtering or cleaning of the data has been carried 
out. From the ranking of 813 bibliometricians who have made their Google 
Scholar Citations profile public, and the top 1057 most cited documents 
in those profiles, two additional rankings have been developed: a 
journal ranking, and an publisher ranking  according to the number of 
citations received..

In short, our aim is to present a multifaceted and integral perspective 
of the discipline, as well as to provide the opportunity for an easy and 
intuitive comparison of these products and the reflections of scientific 
activity each of them portrays. In addition, we also want to bring 
attention to the new platforms that are offering scientific performance 
metrics and look into what their meaning could be. With this step, we 
enter the altmetrics conversation, but with a different approach: we do 
it from the individuals' perspective, and not only from the perspective 
of the documents they publish. In short, to notice what these tools 
really measure while applying it precisely to those who measure

We are currently on an analysis of the data displayed in this product, 
which will be presented shortly in a working paper.

The product is accessible from:

http://www.scholar-mirrors.infoec3.es/

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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