Is Google Scholar useful for bibliometrics? A webometric analysis - Springer

Is Google Scholar useful for bibliometrics? A webometric analysis - Springer
 Google Scholar, the academic bibliographic database provided free-of-charge by the search engine giant Google, has been suggested as an alternative or complementary resource to the commercial citation databases like Web of Knowledge (ISI/Thomson) or Scopus (Elsevier). About 63.8% of the records are hosted in generic domains like .com or .org, confirming that most of the Scholar data come from large commercial or non-profit sources. Considering only institutions with at least one record, one-third of the other items (10.6% from the global) are hosted by the 10,442 universities, while 3,901 research centres amount for an additional 7.9% from the total. The research concludes that Google Scholar lacks the quality control needed for its use as a bibliometric tool; the larger coverage it provides consists in some cases of items not comparable with those provided by other similar databases. The full text of the article is available at the link above.