Impact of data sources on citation counts and rankings of LIS faculty: Web of science versus scopus and google scholar

Abstract The Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI, now Thomson Scientific, Philadelphia, PA) citation databases have been used for decades as a starting point and often as the only tools for locating citations and/or conducting citation analyses. The ISI databases (or Web of Science [WoS]), however, may no longer be sufficient because new databases and tools that allow citation searching are now available. Using citations to the work of 25 library and information science (LIS) faculty members as a case study, the authors examine the effects of using Scopus and Google Scholar (GS) on the citation counts and rankings of scholars as measured by WoS. Overall, more than 10,000 citing and purportedly citing…