Jeffrey Perkel has an article on The Future of Citation Analysis in the October 24 issue of The Scientist. It's not OA, so I can't read or excerpt it. But it quotes Péter Jacsó and Jacsó has posted some background details to explain his quotation in Perkel's article. Excerpt:
This is a background piece for the interview made with Jeff Perkel for the article in The Scientist. Considering the limitations of the print edition, it is understandable that only a small part of my argument could be included. I provide here some background illustrations and comments to my correctly quoted remark that Google Scholar (GS) does a really horrible job matching cited and citing references. The interview started with an innocent question about my opinion of the article Citation Counts [by Kathleen Bauer and Nisa Bakkalbasi] published in D-Lib Magazine. I said that the comparison of the citedness scores of a single year of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS) which showed that on the average GS detects 4.5 more citing references than Web of Science (WoS) shouldn’t serve as a proof of GS superiority. The test results of the other sample year (1985), which showed that WoS had on the average 7.8 more citing items than GS for the selected 1985 JASIS articles. As the news is always if the postman bites the dog, this did not get the same attention as the other sample....It should have been a warning sign. Google always played fast and loose with its numbers in reporting its hits, and so did its competitors. In the scholarly world this may not fare so well after the honeymoon period with GS is over, and serious users start taking a closer look at the a) hits which appear in the result list, b) the reported citedness scores, and c) the items purportedly citing the ones in the result list. I knew that I must use some tailor-made examples to get my message through....Suffice it to repeat here what The Scientist quoted from me: GS often can’t tell apart a page number from a publication year, part of the title of a book from a journal name, and dumps at you absurd data, such as the record of an article which GS happily serves up when looking for upcoming articles on semiconductors to be published in 2006 (possibly available already in the publisher’s archive to which GS has a free pass)....Mind me, GS has access to the neat and clean metadata of millions of articles, courtesy of the grateful publishers, labeling the data elements as foods are labeled in a senior citizen home, but it does not help.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/25/2005 10:49:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
