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

[Emilio Delgado López-Cózar]

Dear Lutz,

thank you for your kind comments.

We created Dr. Garfield's Google Scholar profile in private (it's not 
accessible to the public) following the same procedures we previously 
used for creating the profiles of other great researchers in our field, 
and that way we could collect the same indicators we collected for the 
rest of researchers. We made this exception with him because we believe 
the product would be incomplete without him.

This product, as its title suggests, is a mirror of the different ways 
a researcher's scientific performance can be represented on the Web. We 
wanted to compare all these different platforms, and precisely, to bring 
attention to the differences among them. As you noticed, there is a huge 
difference between the h index according to ResearcherID (WoS data) and 
the h index according to Google Scholar, but in this case, the 
difference has been caused by a Web of Science error. If you access Dr. 
Garfield's ResearcherID profile, and sort by citations, you'll find a 
great number of works published on Current Contents, many of them with 
exactly 200 citations. There is another group of works with 155 
citations, and other groups with a smaller number of citations. If you 
access Web of Science and look for these documents, you'll notice all of 
them have been attributed the same group of citations, incorrectly. 
There are even cases of documents that cite themselves! This is clearly 
an error on the part of Web of Science, and one of the goals of our 
product is to bring attention to these errors.

As we stated in the previous message, we're writing a paper about the 
data found in these tables where this error, and some others, will be 
addressed.

Thank you again for you interest.

Best regards,

Emilio