Coverage of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science: a case study of the h-index in nursing

This study compares the articles cited in CINAHL, Scopus, Web of Science (WOS), and Google Scholar and the h-index ratings provided by Scopus, WOS, and Google Scholar.

The publications of 30 College of Nursing faculty at a large urban university were examined. Searches by author name were executed in Scopus, WOS, and POP (Publish or Perish, which searches Google Scholar), and the h-index for each author from each database was recorded. In addition, the citing articles of their published articles were imported into a bibliographic management program. This data was used to determine an aggregated h-index for each author.

Scopus, WOS, and Google Scholar provided different h-index ratings for authors and each database found unique and duplicate citing references.

More than one tool should be used to calculate the h-index for nursing faculty because one tool alone cannot be relied on to provide a thorough assessment of a researcher's impact. If researchers are interested in a comprehensive h-index, they should aggregate the citing references located by WOS and Scopus. Because h-index rankings differ among databases, comparisons between researchers should be done only within a specified database.