Benchmarking Google Scholar with the New Zealand PBRF Research Assessment Exercise

Abstract

Google Scholar was used to generate citation counts to the web-based research output of New Zealand Universities. Total citations and hits from Google Scholar correlated with the research output as measured by the official New Zealand Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) exercise. The article discusses the use of Google Scholar as a cybermetric tool and methodology issues in obtaining citation counts for institutions. Google Scholar is compared with other tools that provide web citation data: Web of Science, SCOPUS, and the Wolverhampton Cybermetric Crawler.