Counting the citations: a comparison of Web of Science and Google Scholar in the field of business and management

Abstract:Assessing the quality of the knowledge produced by business and management academics is increasingly being metricated. Moreover, emphasis is being placed on the impact of the research rather than simply where it is published. The main metric for impact is the number of citations a paper receives. Traditionally this data has come from the ISI Web of Science but research has shown that this has poor coverage in the social sciences. A newer and different source for citations is Google Scholar. In this paper we compare the two on a dataset of over 4,600 publications from three UK Business Schools. The results show that Web of Science is indeed poor in the area of management and that Google Scholar, whilst somewhat unreliable, has a much better coverage. The conclusion is that Web of Science should not be used for measuring research impact in management.

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