Google Scholar's Ranking Algorithm: The Impact of ... - Bela Gipp

Here, further research is required as well as for the weight of otherfactors such as the age (upcoming paper see [14]).In the final analysis, due to the strong weight on citation counts,Google Scholar is more suited when searching for popularstandard literature than for searching gems, the latest trends, orpapers whose authors are advancing views opposite to themainstream. This is neither good nor bad, but users should beaware of it. Google Scholar also strengthens the Matthew Effect:articles with many citations will be more likely displayed in a topposition, get more readers and receive more citations, which thenconsolidate their lead over articles which are cited less often. IfGoogle Scholar should become only partly as popular forscientific articles as it is for web pages, there would be an evenhigher incentive for researchers to influence their article‟s citationcounts; for instance via self citations or citation alliances.7. REMARKWe would be delighted to share the Google Scholar parsersoftware, including gathered data, with other researchers whowish to perform their own research or evaluate ours. Please sendus an email if you are interested in the data or the software.8. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSOur thanks go to Ammar Shaker for supporting the developmentof the Google Scholar parser. In addition we have to thank Dr.Wolfgang Lehmann for his advice. We regret that we had not thetime to consider all of his feedback.9. REFERENCES[1] R. K. Merton, “The Matthew Effect in Science,” Science, vol.159, no. 3810, pp. 56–63, January 1968.[2] (2006, August) Click Through Rate of Google Search Results- AOL-data.tgz - Want to Know How Many Clicks The no.1Google Position Gets? Red Cardinal Blog. Red Cardinal Ltd.[3] J. Beel and B. Gipp, “The Potential of CollaborativeDocument Evaluation for Science,” in 11th InternationalConference on Digital Asian Libraries (ICADL'08), ser. LectureNotes in Computer Science (LNCS), G. Buchanan,M. Masoodian, and S. J. Cunningham, Eds., vol. 5362.Heidelberg (Germany): Springer, December 2008, pp. 375–378.[4] J. Beel and B. Gipp, “Collaborative Document Evaluation: AnAlternative Approach to Classic Peer Review,” in 5thInternational Conference on Digital Libraries (ICDL'08), ser.Proceedings of World Academy of Science, Engineering andTechnology, vol. 31, August 2008, pp. 410–413.[5] J. Bailey, C. Zhang, D. Budgen, M. Turner, and S. Charters,“Search Engine Overlaps : Do they agree or disagree?” in SecondInternational Workshop on Realising Evidence-Based SoftwareEngineering (REBSE '07), 2007, p. 2.[6] K. Yang and L. I. Meho, “Citation Analysis: A Comparison ofGoogle Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science,” in 69th AnnualMeeting of the American Society for Information Science andTechnology, Austin (US), 2006, pp. 3–8.[7] W. H. Walters, “Google Scholar coverage of amultidisciplinary field,” Information Processing & Management,vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 1121–1132, July 2007.[8] J. J. Meier and T. W. Conkling, “Google Scholar‟s Coverageof the Engineering Literature: An Empirical Study,” The Journalof Academic Librarianship, vol. 34, no. 34, pp. 196–201, 2008.[9] J. Bar-Ilan, “Which h-index? - A comparison of WoS, Scopusand Google Scholar,” Scientometrics, vol. 74, no. 2, pp. 257–271,2007.[10] P. Jacso, “Google Scholar: the pros and the cons,” OnlineInformation Review, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 208–214, 2005.[11] B. White, “Examining the claims of Google Scholar as aserious information source,” New Zealand Library & InformationManagement Journal, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 11–24, 2006.[12] (2008) About Google Scholar. Website. Google Inc.[Online].Available:http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/about.html[13] J. Beel and B. Gipp, “Google Scholar's Ranking Algorithm:An Introductory Overview (Research in Progress),” to bepublished, 2009.[14] J. Beel and B. Gipp, “Google Scholar's Ranking Algorithm:The Impact of Articles' Age (An Empirical Study),” inProceedings of 6th International Conference on InformationTechnology : New Generations (ITNG'09). IEEE, 2009.[15] B. Gipp and J. Beel, “Scienstein: A Research PaperRecommender System,” in International Conference on EmergingTrends in Computing. IEEE, 2009, pp. 309–315.[16] S. Haywood. (2008) The Academic Word List. University ofNottingham. [Online]. Available:http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/ alzsh3/acvocab/wordlists.htm