News & Views item - August 2011

 

 

 Scientific Metrics for Free. (August 29, 2011)

 Never mind Thomson Reuters' Web of Knowledge and Elsevier's Scopus database, the latter so dear to the hearts of the formulators of our ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), Google has recently made publicly available an addition to Google Scholar it has dubbed Google Scholar Citations (GSC) while Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) has recently introduced a collection of new apps based on its citation metrics.

 

As an example of what can be done with GSC you can nominate a researcher for which you wish to create profiles of his/her publications, which will allow you to examine graphics of the number of citations these papers have received over time, as well as ancillary metrics such as Jorge Hirsch's h-index, which attempts to gauge the individuals productivity and overall impact based on her/his publications.

 

NatureNews' Declan Butler points out that  at present: "Google Scholar has indexed much more of the literature than has MAS, or indeed Web of Knowledge or Scopus," however, "Microsoft Academic Search is still a nascent offering to the community," explains Lee Dirks, director of education and scholarly communication at Microsoft Research Connections, and Mr Butler writes that "MAS's content surged from 15.7 million to 27.1 million publications between March and June and that pace will continue, says Dirks".

 

Anne-Wil Harzing at the University of Melbourne, who develops tools to extract citation metrics from Google Scholar, says that MAS has "great potential'. Dr Harzing believes that critics often focus too much on extreme bibliographic errors and maintains that the overall level of errors in Google Scholar is so low that it does not greatly affect the accuracy of calculations such as the h-index.

 

Anurag Acharya, the Google engineer behind Google Scholar, told Mr Butler that he is driven by a humanitarian goal: making available to everybody services that were previously accessible only to those at richer institutions. He says he finds it "satisfying" that Google Scholar's server logs reveal widespread use by researchers in poorer countries, where commercial services are often unavailable.

 

On the other hand Joel Hammond, director of product development at Thomson Reuters told him Thomson Reuters controls which publications it indexes more strictly than do the free services, and argues that this makes its metrics calculations more reliable and Scopus argues similarly.

 

Carl Bergstrom, a biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, who collaborates with both Microsoft Research and Thomson Reuters to analyse citation data, in rebuttal told Mr Butler: "[GSC and MAS] have the major advantage of being freely available to anyone, and with continued development I think they have the potential to become serious competitors to the commercial products." And Ton van Raan, a bibliometrics expert at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands, agrees: "It is clear that the commercial citation index producers will be more and more in competition with these free-access facilities."

 

However, the question remains as to what extent the judgement of applications for research grants should be governed by an individual's/group's citations which is in effect passing the buck of responsibility by the granting body and those it utilises as evaluators (referees).