Google Scholar Metrics for Publications • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Scholar Metrics for Publications

#11

Post by streptomycin » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 1:57 PM UTC

yungchin wrote: post #8

noelwelsh wrote: post #4

It's interesting to note that the 5th highest ranked publication is arXiv. For those who aren't familiar with it, arxiv.org is an open-access repository of academic papers, mostly in quantitative science. In my field (computer science) it is standard practice to deposit a copy of one's papers in arxiv before submitting them for publication, and arxiv is the place to find the latest research. There is currently a lot…

It's still surprising that arxiv is that high up. You'd think most people would cite the definitive publications, not the preprints at arxiv? Anyway, given that in some fields _everything_ that's written goes to arxiv, arxiv will [by definition][1] have a very high h-index. The thing is, the h-index was conceived to compare individuals, not journals. [1]: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0508025

Google Scholar also indexes papers that are only published on arxiv, which likely often include citations to other things on arxiv.

Re: Google Scholar Metrics for Publications

#12

Post by streptomycin » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 1:59 PM UTC

throwaway1979 wrote: post #7

The only CS conference/journal I saw on the list was "IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR". That's not the top CS venue I know of.

That conference probably has a lot of biology stuff going on and, if you noticed the list of journals, they're almost all biology related. CS is a relatively small field, in comparison.

Re: Google Scholar Metrics for Publications

#13

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 2:07 PM UTC

throwaway1979 wrote: post #7

The only CS conference/journal I saw on the list was "IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR". That's not the top CS venue I know of.

[deleted]

Re: Google Scholar Metrics for Publications

#14

Post by synparb » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 2:48 PM UTC

lawlesst wrote: post #10

It's nice to see that Google is adding features to Scholar. There's concern in the library community that it will go away since its not a revenue producing service. Incidentally, Microsoft Academic Search is pretty impressive so far. They've added many features. They also have an API that is pretty easy to use, which Scholar doesn't. http://academic.research.microsoft.com/

I just looked at Microsoft's offering, and while it has a lot of nice features it seems like the citation counts are wildly wrong when compared to the numbers produced by Web of Science and Google Scholar. Perhaps they have not completed their indexing yet. A few other concerns that I have besides inaccuracy are (1) The interface is significantly more cluttered and confusing, and (2) In their decision to auto-generate profiles, rather than wait for authors to create their own, you have a glut of profiles that again are incorrect in the papers that are attributed to them. The chances that a significant number of people are going to go in and curate their profiles seems small, instead of having a limited but accurate collection of profiles, you end of having a majority of incorrect ones.

Re: Google Scholar Metrics for Publications

#15

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 3:33 PM UTC

synparb wrote: post #14

lawlesst wrote: post #10

It's nice to see that Google is adding features to Scholar. There's concern in the library community that it will go away since its not a revenue producing service. Incidentally, Microsoft Academic Search is pretty impressive so far. They've added many features. They also have an API that is pretty easy to use, which Scholar doesn't. http://academic.research.microsoft.com/

I just looked at Microsoft's offering, and while it has a lot of nice features it seems like the citation counts are wildly wrong when compared to the numbers produced by Web of Science and Google Scholar. Perhaps they have not completed their indexing yet. A few other concerns that I have besides inaccuracy are (1) The interface is significantly more cluttered and confusing, and (2) In their decision to auto-generat…

[deleted]

Re: Google Scholar Metrics for Publications

#16

Post by mjn » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 3:41 PM UTC

lawlesst wrote: post #10

It's nice to see that Google is adding features to Scholar. There's concern in the library community that it will go away since its not a revenue producing service. Incidentally, Microsoft Academic Search is pretty impressive so far. They've added many features. They also have an API that is pretty easy to use, which Scholar doesn't. http://academic.research.microsoft.com/

The "citation context" for a paper in Microsoft's search is particularly nice. Instead of just a list of papers that cite a given paper, you can get little blurb excerpts of the sentences that cite it.

Re: Google Scholar Metrics for Publications

#17

Post by fatjokes » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 5:12 PM UTC

Interesting... how is CVPR the only computer science-related publication in the top 100?

Re: Google Scholar Metrics for Publications

#18

Post by fatjokes » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 5:13 PM UTC

throwaway1979 wrote: post #7

The only CS conference/journal I saw on the list was "IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR". That's not the top CS venue I know of.

it is the top venue in the field of computer vision

Re: Google Scholar Metrics for Publications

#19

Post by fatjokes » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 5:15 PM UTC

streptomycin wrote: post #12

throwaway1979 wrote: post #7

The only CS conference/journal I saw on the list was "IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR". That's not the top CS venue I know of.

That conference probably has a lot of biology stuff going on and, if you noticed the list of journals, they're almost all biology related. CS is a relatively small field, in comparison.

Nope. CVPR doesn't have too much biology in it (it does have a little). It tries to do a bit of cogsci, but it's mostly ML applied to vision. It generally doesn't use applications in the medical field either (there are bigger conferences for medical imaging).

Re: Google Scholar Metrics for Publications

#20

Post by stfu » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 6:07 PM UTC

noelwelsh wrote: post #4

It's interesting to note that the 5th highest ranked publication is arXiv. For those who aren't familiar with it, arxiv.org is an open-access repository of academic papers, mostly in quantitative science. In my field (computer science) it is standard practice to deposit a copy of one's papers in arxiv before submitting them for publication, and arxiv is the place to find the latest research. There is currently a lot…

The question is how "serious" Google scholar rankings are going to be seen. In the past quite a few demonstrations have shown, that the Google scholar ranking/citation system can be gamed with relatively little effort. Let's hope that it will have more impact than those University rankings which calculate the scores based on aspects such as the inbound/outbound link ratio (as some web"metric" rankings indeed do).