Evaluation of citation enhanced scholarly databases

Abstract

Citation data is not only an excellent tool for optimizing journal collection but also powerful tool to find relevant materials that one would not find through traditional control vocabulary searching using descriptors, using subject headings or even free text from the title and the abstract and the full text of journals. In the recent years, there are many databases enhanced with cited references being emerged. The author deals with Web of science, Scopus, and Google Scholars among them to evaluate and compare them. As evaluation items, he shows size, currency, subject and document type. He discusses weakness in Google Scholar, and strengths in Scopus and Web of Science. Then he discusses software to process such databases enhanced with cited references. The author recognized importance in sorting function and relative cited times, and proposes those to be realized