Harvesting capability of Google scholar: a comparative study of three major journal lists—Directory of Open Access Journals,Highwire,and BioMed Central

Abstract

Google is considered to be a monolithic Internet power. Among its various existing products, Google Scholar is an incredible tool that allows researchers to search for a wide array of scholarly literature across the web. The study is a sample test of Google Scholar's credibility and harvesting capability by submitting select titles from the field of microbiology in three major, renowned, and open-access journal lists—Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Highwire, and BioMed Central. The findings reveal that out of the 354 submitted titles, only 16.38% were clearly identified. The highest number of titles, that is, 52.32%, was retrieved from BioMed Central, followed by 25.37% from Highwire, and 21.7% from DOAJ. They provide most (65.50%) of the record as full text, followed by links (32.71%) and a negligible ratio of records as citations (1.78%). The study further reveals that some results are available under multiple URLs, thus leading to duplication. The highest percentage of results is from open-access web servers (49.64%). A total of 10.63% of web servers were found to be present in foreign languages, followed by an organizational contribution of 9.92% and 2.12% from conventional data providers.