Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 2, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 2, 2021 - Apr 27, 2021
Date Accepted: Mar 15, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
What types of errors are hiding in Google Scholar data? Methodological concerns
ABSTRACT
Background:
Google Scholar (GS) is a free tool that may be used by researchers to analyze citations, to find appropriate literature or to evaluate the quality of an author or a contender for tenure, promotion, a faculty position, funding or research grants. GS has become a major bibliographic and citation database. Following the literature, databases such as PubMed, PsycINFO, Scopus or Web of Science can be used in place of GS because they are more reliable.
Objective:
The aim of this study is to examine the accuracy of citation data collected from GS and provide a comprehensive description of the errors and miscounts identified.
Methods:
281 documents that cited two specific works were retrieved from the Publish or Perish software and examined. This work studied the false positive issue inherent in the analysis of neuroimaging data.
Results:
The results reveal an unprecedented error rate: 99.3% of the references examined contain at least one error. Consequently, Google Scholar data not only fail to be accurate but also potentially expose those researchers who would use these data without verification to substantial biases in their analyses and results.
Conclusions:
Google Scholar data not only fail to be accurate but also potentially expose those researchers who would use these data without verification to substantial biases in their analyses and results.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.