Hello Mason,
What may be useful for you are some comparisons that have been published in recent years, comparing Google Scholar to ISI and other metrics, including Hirsch's h Index (2005, 2007), which is increasingly used in the sciences (see references below).
Incidentally, many warn against using journal impact scores to assess scholars. Even ISI, publisher of the Journal Impact Factor report, cautions that "perhaps the most prominent misuse of the Journal Impact Factor is its misapplication to draw conclusions about the performance of an individual researcher". It unequivocally states: "do not use the Journal Impact Factor to assess the performance of an individual researcher. As with all of the metrics provided through Journal Citation Reports, the Journal Impact Factor can only be used to evaluate journals" (italics added; Thomson Reuters, 2008).
I hope that this is helpful.
SSL
Harzing, A.-W. K., R. van der Wal. 2007. A Google Scholar H-Index for Journals: A Better Metric to Measure Journal Impact in Economics & Business? Working Paper.
Harzing, A.-W. K., R. van der Wal. 2008. Google Scholar as a new source for citation analysis? Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 8 62-71.
Harzing, A.-W. K., R. van der Wal. 2009. A Google Scholar H-Index for Journals: An Alternative Metric to Measure Journal Impact in Economics & Business? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60(1) 41-46.
Kousha, K., M. Thelwall. 2007. Google Scholar Citations and Google Web/URL Citations: A Multi-Discipline Exploratory Analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58 1055-1065.
Kousha, K., M. Thelwall. 2008. Sources of Google Scholar citations outside the Science Citation Index: A comparison between four science disciplines. Scientometrics 74(2) 273-294.
Meho, L. I., K. Yang. 2007. A New Era in Citation and Bibliometric Analyses: Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58 1-21.
Thomson Reuters. 2008. Preserving the Integrity of the Journal Impact Factor, Guidelines from the Scientific business of Thomson Reuters
Hirsch, J. E. 2005. An Index to Quantify an Individual's Scientific Research Output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(46): 16569–16572.
Hirsch, J. E. 2007. Does the H-Index Have Predictive Power? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104: 19193.
_____________________________________________________________
Sheen S. Levine, PhD (Wharton)
Assistant Professor of Management
Singapore Management University
50 Stamford Rd.,Singapore 178899
Telephone +65 68280756
http://www.sslevine.com/
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From: Business Policy and Strategy List [mailto:BPS-NET@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Mason Carpenter
Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 1:51 AM
To: BPS-NET@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Question about sources for citation count data in tenure and promotion cases
Colleagues,
I was hoping you could share your school's practice regarding the source of citation data used in promotion cases. Up until last year, we used only ISI data (through the Web of Knowledge interface), although external letter writers used both ISI and Google Scholar numbers in their evaluations. This year we are using a blend of Google Scholar (with the Publish or Perish interface) and ISI – as a footnote, you might be surprised to know that there is not complete overlap between Google Scholar and ISI (I think most scholars assume that ISI is a small subset of Google Scholar, and that Google Scholar captures all ISI cites). As you know, Google Scholar will generate somewhere between two and 10-times the citation count that might be found with ISI.
What source of citation data does your school use? If you use Google Scholar, do you only use the cites for the published work, or do you add in cites for prior working and conference papers? Any info regarding your practice would be welcome.
Thanks and regards, Mason A. Carpenter
University of Wisconsin-Madison