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The purpose of this study is to analyze the use of Google Scholar Citations’ profiling platform by library and information science (LIS) scholars in Pakistan.

Purposive sampling was used to collect Google Scholar Citations profiles between 15 November 2017 and 31 January 2018. Resultant data were analyzed in SPSS Version 21.

In terms of demographical data, the study results were consistent with previous studies of Pakistani LIS scholars. There were strong correlations between Google Scholar Citations metrics (publications, citations, h-index and i10-index). The results indicate that, compared with a 2011 survey of LIS academics in Pakistan, the overall uptake for this cohort remains relatively low. This cohort is not maximizing the opportunity provided by this specific online profiling system to increase research visibility.

As the study was limited to those Pakistani LIS scholars who already had a profile on ResearchGate, it would be useful to broaden the research to encompass all Pakistani LIS scholars.

The role of the librarian as an adviser in scholarly communication and impact can be extended to support scholars in the adoption of new online platforms for scholarly communication and visibility.

There have been no published research studies on Google Scholar Citations metrics in the context of Pakistani LIS scholars as a whole.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the usage, captures, mentions, social media and citations of highly cited papers of Library and information science (LIS).

This study is quantitative research that was conducted using scientometrics and altmetrics indicators. The research sample consists of LIS classic papers. The papers contain highly cited papers of LIS that are introduced by Google Scholar. The research data have been gathered from Google Scholar, Scopus and Plum Analytics Categories. The data analysis has been done by Excel and SPSS applications.

The data indicate that among the highly cited articles of LIS, the highest score regarding the usage, captures, mentions and social media and the most abundance of citations belong to “Citation advantage of open access articles” and “Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems.” Based on the results of Spearman statistical tests, there is a positive significant correlation between Google Scholar Citations and all studied indicators. However, only the correlation between Google Scholar Citations with capture metrics (p-value = 0.047) and citation metrics (p-value = 0.0001) was statistically significant.

Altmetrics indicators can be used as complement traditional indicators of Scientometrics to study the impact of papers. Therefore, the Altmetrics knowledge of LIS researchers and experts and practicing new studies in this field will be very important.

Google Scholar has been increasingly used in the past six to seven years as a highly efficient information source and service by librarians and other information professionals. The problem is when Google Scholar is touted and used as a bibliometric/scientometric tool and resource in the assessment of the quantity (productivity) and quality (impact) of research publications, in formal and informal ways, for decisions related to tenure, promotion and grant applications of individual researchers and research groups, as well as in journal subscriptions and cancellations. This paper aims to examine this issue.

The paper discusses the use of Google Scholar for journal impact factors and the h‐index in nationwide publishing assessments in academia. It focuses on the issues of access and excess in Google Scholar: the innate limits of Google Scholar and those imposed by its developers on the users.

The paper reveals that issues of access and excess in Google Scholar prevent the researchers from doing appropriate content analysis that the best librarians and other information professionals do systematically to discover the pros and cons of databases. The excess content grossly dilutes the originally worthy collection of scholarly publications. The accuracy, reliability and reproducibility are essential for realistic research assessment through the prism of the quantity (publication counts) and quality (citation counts) of scholarly works. Unfortunately the metadata created by Google Scholar is substandard, neither reliable nor reproducible and it distorts the metric indicators at the individual, corporate and journal levels.

The paper provides useful information on the use of Google Scholar for journal impact factors and the h‐index in academic publishing.

The study's main purpose is to scrutinize Google Scholar profiles and find the answer to the question, “Do authors play fair or manipulate Google Scholar Bibliometric Indicators like h-index and i10-index?”

The authors scrutinized the Google Scholar profiles of the top 50 library and science researchers claiming authorship of 21,022 publications. The bibliographic information of all the 21,022 publications like authorship and subject details were verified to identify accuracy, discrepancies and manipulation in their authorship claims. The actual and fabricated entries of all the authors along with their citations were recorded in the Microsoft Office Excel 2007 for further analyses and interpretation using simple arithmetic calculations.

The results show that the h-index of authors obtained from the Google Scholar should not be approved at its face value as the variations exist in the publication count and citations, which ultimately affect their h-index and i10 index. The results reveal that the majority of the authors have variations in publication count (58%), citations (58%), h-index (42%) and i10-index (54%). The magnitude of variation in the number of publications, citations, h-index and i10-index is very high, especially for the top-ranked authors.

The scope of the study is strictly restricted to the faculty members of library and information science and cannot be generalized across disciplines. Further, the scope of the study is limited to Google Scholar and caution needs to be taken to extend results to other databases like Web of Science and Scopus.

The study has practical implications for authors, publishers, and academic institutions. Authors must stop the unethical research practices; publishers must adopt techniques to overcome the problem and academic institutions need to take precautions before hiring, recruiting, promoting and allocating resources to the candidates on the face value of the Google Scholar h-index. Besides, Google needs to work on the weak areas of Google Scholar to improve its efficacy.

The study brings to light the new ways of manipulating bibliometric indicators like h-index, and i10-index provided by Google Scholar using false authorship claims.

The purpose of this paper is to review the software and content features of the Google Scholar Metrics (GSM) service launched in April 2012.

The paper reviews GSM, examining the software, browsing, searching and sorting functions, citation matching and content.

The paper reveals that the service can offer a better alternative than the traditional Google Scholar service to discover and judge the standing of journals through the prism of their citedness. GSM could become a potentially useful complementary resource primarily by virtue of its brand recognition, and the convenience of not requiring the installation of additional software, but currently its bibliometric indicators are often inappropriate for decision making in matters of tenure, promotion, grants and accreditation.

The paper provides a good understanding of the GSM service.

The activities of academic researchers are increasingly regulated by neo-liberal ideals, including expectations that researchers are visible online and actively promote their output. The purpose of this paper is to explore how researchers take on this responsibility. It uses the concepts of genre, authorship and self-writing in order to understand how the story of an academic life is constructed on academic web profiles.

A qualitative content analysis was conducted of material on 64 profiles belonging to 20 researchers on institutional and personal websites, as well as on ResearchGate, Academica.edu and Google Scholar.

The study shows that while institutional websites primarily contain researcher-produced material, content on commercial platforms is often co-constructed through distributed authorship by the researcher, the platform and other platform users. Nine different ways in which the profile of an “academic self” may be said to highlight the particular strengths of a researcher are identified. These include both metrics-based strengths and qualitative forms of information about the academic life, such as experience, the importance of their research and good teaching.

This study of academic web profiles contributes to a better understanding of how researchers self-govern the story of their academic self, or resist such governance, in online environments.

The study furthers the knowledge of how researchers make use of and respond to digital tools for online visibility opportunities and how the story of the “academic self” is “made” for such public presentation.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the findings of two recently published papers (Norris and Oppenheim, 2003; and Li et al., 2010).

The findings were analysed from the practitioner's perspective about the procedures involved in calculating the indicator values and the ranks and ratings. This was done with the purpose of playing the devil's advocate, contemplating the reservations and arguments of those who do not want to use metrics based on database searches.

One advantage of this project is that its results can be compared at least partially with the findings of the three earlier RAEs (although its grade classes have changed), as well as with some of the other ranking lists in library and information management areas.

Very importantly, the authors concluded that “it would be premature in the extreme to suggest that citation‐based indicators could be used as a cost‐effective alternative to expert judgments”. This is a strong, very realistic and fair statement. Even this recent project's results are very valuable in spite of the problems mentioned.

The purpose of this paper is to report the benefits of scientific communication model of open access (OA) repositories to e-theses. Specifically, the study focusses on the benefits of accessibility, dissemination, visibility and impact of PhD e-theses deposited in repositories.

The study analysed a random sample of 125 PhD e-theses deposited in an OA repository, specifically in the institutional repository (IR) of the University of Salamanca (Gredos). It tracked the sample for analysing on one side the visits and downloads of the e-theses, whose data are obtained from the statistics module of the repository, and on the other side the data citation provided by Google Scholar Citation on these e-theses. To analyse the differences between the indicators (visits, downloads and citations) in different knowledge areas, the Kurskall-Wallis test has been used.

The results indicate that OA IRs become an advantageous channel of scientific communication to grey literature like dissertations and PhD theses, because it increases visibility and use and also produces a significant citation rate.

The paper uses metrics that are used in IR to measure the visibility and impact of a type of grey literature that is very difficult to track because it is unpublished. The dissemination of the grey literature through OA repositories makes it possible. The value of the work lies in the empirical evidence obtained from the analysed PhD e-theses of Gredos repository.

This paper aims to answer the question of how the Polish representatives of social communication and media sciences communicate the most recent scientific findings in the media space, i.e. what types of publications are shared, what activities do they exemplify (sharing information about their own publications, leading discussions, formulating opinions), what is the form of the scientific communication created by them (publication of reference lists' descriptions, full papers, preprints and post prints) and what is the audience reception (number of downloads, displays, comments).

The authors present the results of analysis conducted on the presence of the most recent (2017–2019) publications by the Polish representatives of the widely understood social communication and media sciences in three selected social networking services for scientists: ResearchGate, Google Scholar and Academia.edu. The analyses covered 100 selected representatives of the scientific environment (selected in interval sampling), assigned, according to the OECD classification “Field of Science”, in the “Ludzie nauki” (Men of Science) database to the “media and communication” discipline.

The conducted analyses prove a low usage level of the potential of three analysed services for scientists by the Polish representatives of social communication and media sciences. Although 60% of them feature profiles in at least one of the services, the rest are not present there at all. From the total of 113 identified scientists' profiles, as little as 65 feature publications from 2017 to 2019. Small number of alternative metrics established in them, implies, in turn, that if these metrics were to play an important role in evaluation of the value and influence of scientific publications, then this evaluation for the researched Polish representatives of social communication and media sciences would be unfavourable.

The small presence of the Polish representatives of the communication and media sciences in three analysed services shows that these services may be – for the time being – only support the processes of managing own scientific output. Maybe this quite a pessimistic image of scientists' activities in the analysed services is conditioned by a simple lack of the need to be present in electronic channels of scientific communication or the lack of trust to the analysed services, which, in turn, should be linked to their shortcomings and flaws. However, unequivocal confirmation of these hypotheses might be brought by explorations covering a larger group of scientists, and complemented with survey studies. Thus, this research may constitute merely a starting point for further explorations, including elaboration of good practices with respect to usage of social media by scientists.

The purpose of this case study was to complement existing weeding and retention criteria beyond the most used methods in academic libraries and to consider citation counts in the identification of important scholarly works.

Using a small sample of items chosen for withdrawal from a small liberal arts college library, this case study looks at the use of Google Scholar citation counts as a metric for identification of notable monographs in the social sciences and mathematics.

Google Scholar citation counts are a quick indicator of classic, foundational or discursive monographs in a particular field and should be given more consideration in weeding and retention analysis decisions that impact scholarly collections. Higher citation counts can be an indicator of higher circulation counts.

The authors found little indication in the literature that Google Scholar citation counts are being used as a metric for identification of notable works or for retention of monographs in academic libraries.