Research output and impact of the fields of management, economics, and sociology in spain and france: An analysis using google scholar and scopus

Because of a greater coverage of documentary sources in many languages that is greater than that of traditional bibliographic databases, Google Scholar is an ideal tool for examining the social sciences in non‐Anglophone countries. We have therefore used it to study the scholarly output and impact of three scientific disciplines, management, economics, and sociology, in Spain and France, comparing some of the results with those retrieved with Scopus. Our findings show that scientific articles are the predominant form of scholarly communication in Google Scholar for our selected fields and countries. In addition, our results indicate that in Google Scholar the vernacular languages of each country are more used than English in all cases, but economics in France. The opposite occurs in Scopus, except for the case of sociology articles in France We also show that books receive on average more citations than other published documents in Google Scholar. Finally, we demonstrate that publishing in English is associated with greater scholarly impact, except for the case of France in Google Scholar for articles in sociology and books in the three fields.

[1]  Fernanda Beigel Publishing from the periphery: Structural heterogeneity and segmented circuits. The evaluation of scientific publications for tenure in Argentina’s CONICET , 2014 .

[2]  Tove Faber Frandsen,et al.  Intradisciplinary differences in database coverage and the consequences for bibliometric research , 2008, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[3]  E. Giménez-Toledo,et al.  From experimentation to coordination in the evaluation of Spanish scientific journals in the humanities and social sciences , 2007 .

[4]  Emilio Delgado López-Cózar,et al.  A two-sided academic landscape : snapshot of highly-cited documents in Google Scholar ( 1950-2013 ) , 2016 .

[5]  Lokman I. Meho,et al.  Impact of data sources on citation counts and rankings of LIS faculty: Web of science versus scopus and google scholar , 2007, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[6]  M. Ryan Haley,et al.  Ranking top economics and finance journals using Microsoft academic search versus Google scholar: How does the new publish or perish option compare? , 2014, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[7]  Emilio Delgado López-Cózar,et al.  Repositories in Google Scholar Metrics or what is this document type doing in a place as such , 2012 .

[8]  Enrique Orduña-Malea,et al.  Methods for estimating the size of Google Scholar , 2014, Scientometrics.

[9]  Ernesto R. Gantman,et al.  Literature segmentation in management and organization studies: The case of Spanish-speaking countries (2000–10) , 2016 .

[10]  M. HamidR.Jamali,et al.  Open access and sources of full-text articles in Google Scholar in different subject fields , 2015, Scientometrics.

[11]  Enrique Orduña-Malea,et al.  H Index Scholar: el índice h de los profesores de las universidades públicas españolas en humanidades y ciencias sociales , 2014 .

[12]  Anne-Wil Harzing,et al.  The Publish or Perish Book: Your guide to effective and responsible citation analysis , 2010 .

[13]  Emilio Delgado López-Cózar,et al.  Spanish personal name variations in national and international biomedical databases: implications for information retrieval and bibliometric studies. , 2002, Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA.

[14]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  No citation advantage for monograph-based collaborations? , 2014, J. Informetrics.

[15]  Goio Etxebarria,et al.  Use of Scopus and Google Scholar to measure social sciences production in four major Spanish universities , 2009, Scientometrics.

[16]  Thed N. van Leeuwen,et al.  Integrating metrics to measure research performance in social sciences and humanities: The case of the Spanish CSIC , 2016 .

[17]  Anton J. Nederhof,et al.  Bibliometric monitoring of research performance in the Social Sciences and the Humanities: A Review , 2006, Scientometrics.

[18]  Yu-Wei Chang,et al.  Characteristics of research output in social sciences and humanities: From a research evaluation perspective , 2008, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[19]  Klaus Brockhoff Characteristics of research , 1997 .

[20]  One Sociology or Many , 2010 .

[21]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Assessing the citation impact of books: The role of Google Books, Google Scholar, and Scopus , 2011, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[22]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Regression for citation data: An evaluation of different methods , 2014, J. Informetrics.

[23]  J. Courtault,et al.  Research in economics and management in France: A bibliometric study using the h-index , 2010 .

[24]  Anne-Wil Harzing,et al.  Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science: a longitudinal and cross-disciplinary comparison , 2015, Scientometrics.

[25]  Eric H. J. Spruyt,et al.  Changing publication patterns in the Social Sciences and Humanities, 2000–2009 , 2012, Scientometrics.

[26]  Nicolás Robinson-García,et al.  The Google scholar experiment: How to index false papers and manipulate bibliometric indicators , 2013, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[27]  P. Masip,et al.  Efecto Aneca: producción española en comunicación en el Social science citation index , 2011 .

[28]  Daniel A. Tirado-Fabregat,et al.  Is there life beyond the ISI Journal lists? The international impact of Spanish, Italian, French and German economics journals , 2010 .

[29]  Miguel A. García-Pérez Accuracy and completeness of publication and citation records in the Web of Science, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar: A case study for the computation of , 2010 .

[30]  W. Powell,et al.  Careers in Print: Books, Journals, and Scholarly Reputations , 1995, American Journal of Sociology.

[31]  Tamara Krajna,et al.  SCImago Journal & Country Rank , 2008 .

[32]  Jerry A. Jacobs,et al.  Journal Rankings in Sociology: Using the H Index with Google Scholar , 2016 .

[33]  Steve G. Probets,et al.  Towards an understanding of the relationship between disciplinary research cultures and open access repository behaviors , 2016, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[34]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Can the impact of non‐Western academic books be measured? An investigation of Google Books and Google Scholar for Malaysia , 2014, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[35]  Nabil Amara,et al.  Counting citations in the field of business and management: why use Google Scholar rather than the Web of Science , 2012, Scientometrics.

[36]  Miguel A. García-Pérez,et al.  Accuracy and completeness of publication and citation records in the Web of Science, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar: A case study for the computation of h indices in Psychology , 2010, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[37]  Carlos A. Díaz-Contreras,et al.  RELACIÓN DEL IMPACTO DE LOS ARTÍCULOS LATINOAMERICANOS SOBRE GERENCIA CON EL IDIOMA EN QUE APARECEN PUBLICADOS , 2014 .

[38]  D. Hicks The Four Literatures of Social Science , 2004 .

[39]  John Mingers,et al.  Normalizing Google Scholar data for use in research evaluation , 2017, Scientometrics.

[40]  Vincent Larivière,et al.  Improving the coverage of social science and humanities researchers' output: The case of the Érudit journal platform , 2011, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[41]  Lutz Bornmann,et al.  On the causes of subject-specific citation rates in Web of Science , 2014, Scientometrics.

[42]  Yasar Tonta,et al.  Does dirty data affect google scholar citations? , 2016, ASIST.

[43]  Anne-Wil Harzing,et al.  Google Scholar as a new source for citation analysis , 2008 .

[44]  Jeffrey Pomerantz Google Scholar and 100 Percent Availability of Information , 2006 .

[45]  Emilio Delgado López-Cózar,et al.  ¿Es posible usar Google Scholar para evaluar a las revistas científicas nacionales en los ámbitos de Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas? El caso de las revistas españolas. , 2012 .

[46]  Andreas Thor,et al.  The application of bibliometrics to research evaluation in the humanities and social sciences: An exploratory study using normalized Google Scholar data for the publications of a research institute , 2016, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[47]  Henk F. Moed,et al.  Suitability of Google Scholar as a source of scientific information and as a source of data for scientific evaluation - Review of the Literature , 2017, J. Informetrics.

[48]  Vincent Larivière,et al.  Benchmarking scientific output in the social sciences and humanities: The limits of existing databases , 2006, Scientometrics.

[49]  Enrique Orduña-Malea,et al.  A two-sided academic landscape: portrait of highly-cited documents in Google Scholar (1950-2013) , 2016, ArXiv.

[50]  Thed N. van Leeuwen,et al.  Using Google Scholar in research evaluation of humanities and social science programs: A comparison with Web of Science data , 2016 .

[51]  Lucien Karpik « Performance », « excellence » et création scientifique , 2012 .

[52]  Sujata Patel The ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions , 2009 .

[53]  Sari Hanafi,et al.  University systems in the Arab East: Publish globally and perish locally vs publish locally and perish globally , 2011 .

[54]  Emilio Delgado López-Cózar,et al.  Can we use Google Scholar to identify highly-cited documents? , 2017, J. Informetrics.