SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION AND SCIENTIFIC SEARCH ENGINES: SCOPING REVIEW

Abstract

To enable scientific development, research must be communicated. Scholarly communication has evolved over the years, but not the way how researchers have to justify their scientific output. This scoping review aims to describe the situation of the main scientific search engines Web of Science and Scopus, which are based on their own journal collections, and others based on citation web searches such as Google Scholar, Dimensions, and The Lens. A bibliographic search was carried out in the Lista, WoS, and Scopus databases for scientific articles dealing with scholarly communication and focusing on the resources analyzed. The search was limited to the years 2016-2021 and to the languages Spanish, English, Catalan, French, Italian and Portuguese. Bibliographic databases such as WoS and Scopus continue giving a biased picture of the influence of research, and web-based tools, such as GS and Dimensions, are resources that still have many shortcomings for not allowing the replication of searches or downloading of data, e.g., by GS. It is therefore recommended to use as much information as possible to have a more complete picture of the care received.