Three Things Learned:
- How to use the Web of Science database.
- How to check how much an author is cited.
- How to use “Find It” button.
Unsure about:
- Why Google Scholar’s works cited count is inaccurate and if there’s a way to get a true estimate using it.
Sam: Peter Jacso, a library science professor at the University of Hawaii, has looked into the issue of Google Scholar citation counts being unreliable and found all sorts of sloppiness on Google’s part. Google Scholar goes to the web sites of the journals and automatically analyzes the articles as web pages. One amusing problem that Google has is that one of the more popular authors it has identified is named “subscribe” (you can guess how that word might wind up on most pages of a journal website). Check out the search results yourself in Google Scholar where “subscribe” is listed as an author name.