I find it curious that the number of citations I see on Google Scholar is much higher than the citations on Research Gate and Academia.edu for the same articles. Can someone explain the rationale for the variance. Perhaps the issue is simply a product of when Academia.edu and Research Gate began collecting data. However, it would seem to me that the data would be more valuable to scholars and researchers if there was an explanation as to why the variance exists.
CC
Hi Cam,
Dean is right in that Google sources citations from all of the web and is inevitably more generous. ISI is the least generous because it only cites from its own database. ISI was the original citation index - it used to take up hundreds of shelves in the library before automation - and is something of a gold standard. Now citation data is available from many sources and therefore there are many answers to "How often has this article been cited". Two more sources I would add are Microsoft Academic and ScienceOpen which both offer citation counts.
BW Matt
Hi Cam,
As far as I am aware, the anomaly and discrepancy is due to the bibliographic 'metric' inclusion criteria. Google Scholar is traditionally the most generous - as it includes a broader range of citation inclusion i.e. citation in theses, reports, book chapters etc. A far more conservative tool, such as ISI Web of Science only cites journal articles in its database. Scimago (Scopus) sits in-between - and the likes of RG, Academia.Edu, Grow Kudos etc vary as well. Mendeley (Elsevier), for instance, only refers to citations within its journals.
In addition to what Dean has said, I think RG only count citations from papers deposited in its database.
Hi Cam,
Dean is right in that Google sources citations from all of the web and is inevitably more generous. ISI is the least generous because it only cites from its own database. ISI was the original citation index - it used to take up hundreds of shelves in the library before automation - and is something of a gold standard. Now citation data is available from many sources and therefore there are many answers to "How often has this article been cited". Two more sources I would add are Microsoft Academic and ScienceOpen which both offer citation counts.
BW Matt
Research Gate only considers journal articles and does not count self-citations. Google includes are own self-citations, which are often necessary eapecially when discussing the progression of our work/project.
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