IT giants launch free science metrics

Nature : Both Google and Microsoft are continuing to develop tools that let researchers analyze citation statistics and visualize research networks, writes Declan Butler for Nature, and they’re offering those tools free of charge. In 2004, Google launched Google Scholar; last month it added Google Scholar Citations. GSC lets researchers create a profile that shows all their articles in Google Scholar’s database, along with the h-index, which is one measure of the overall impact of their publications, along with other citation metrics. GSC is in beta testing, but Google plans to make it available to all researchers. Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) launched in 2009 and has added a suite of tools that include visualizations of citation networks, publication trends, and rankings of leading researchers in a field. Whether computational approaches to bibliography and citation metrics are truly reliable without some human intervention is a matter of debate. Critics point out that text-mining software can misidentify author names or affiliations and thus give skewed results; others say that the overall level of errors—at least in Google Scholar—is so low that the accuracy of robust calculations such as the h-index isn’t affected in any significant way.