Poster Board Number: 114
Title: The H-index in Nursing: Comparison of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science
Objective: Researchers often track citations to determine the impact of their publications. The h-index determines individuals’ impact in their field. Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science (WOS) display articles cited by articles indexed in their respective databases. In addition, WOS and Scopus provide the h-index for individual researchers. Harzing’s Publish or Perish (POP) provides the h-index for articles retrieved through Google Scholar. The study compares the articles cited in CINAHL, Google Scholar, Scopus, and WOS, and the h-index ratings provided by POP, Scopus, and WOS.
Methods: Twenty nursing researchers were randomly selected from a list of nursing faculty at a large urban university with a health sciences campus. Searches by author name were executed in the POP, Scopus, and WOS databases, and the h-index for each author from each database was recorded. In addition, the citing articles of the published articles were imported into a bibliographic management program. The total number of citations and duplicate citations imported from each database and the total number of unique citations from all databases were recorded. The h-index and unique citations retrieved from each database were compared to determine the database most comprehensive for determining the h-index.
Results: Google Scholar, Scopus, and WOS all provide different h-index ratings for authors. Google Scholar presents the highest rating, followed by Scopus, and then WOS. The databases vary in terms of the journals indexed and additional resources (theses, books) included, which accounts for some of the variability. Each database (CINAHL, Google Scholar, Scopus, WOS) found unique cited references, although there was also duplication between databases. Because Google Scholar is not a controlled database indexing finite items, there can be false hits from Google Scholar including duplicates within the database.
Conclusions: If researchers are interested in the most reflective author h-index, they should search all databases for a comprehensive list of citing articles, although this is time consuming. Because of the variability in results between databases providing h-indexes, comparisons of author h-index ratings between researchers should only be done within a specified database that provides the h-index.
Authors: Sandra L. De Groote, AHIP, Scholarly Communications Librarian, University Library; Rebecca Raszewski, AHIP, Information Services Librarian, Library of the Health Sciences-Chicago; University of Illinois, Chicago, IL
