What does this research mean for the field?

Google Scholar provides better recall and precision than most subscription-based bibliographic databases for multidisciplinary literature searches. Novelty: ClaimNovelty.CONTRADICTORY. Consensus alignment: ConsensusAlignment.CHALLENGES_CONSENSUS.

What question did this study set out to answer?

The evaluation aims to compare the search performance of Google Scholar with 11 bibliographic databases in finding relevant articles on later-life migration.

January 1, 2009

Google Scholar Search Performance: Comparative Recall and Precision

Key Points

The evaluation aims to compare the search performance of Google Scholar with 11 bibliographic databases in finding relevant articles on later-life migration.
Conducted keyword searches across Google Scholar and 11 bibliographic databases.
Evaluated performance based on recall and precision relative to 155 pre-identified relevant articles.
Utilized a rigorous evaluation procedure to ensure accurate comparisons.
Google Scholar demonstrated superior recall compared to most other databases.
In terms of precision, Google Scholar also outperformed the majority of subscription databases.
These findings challenge previous perceptions held by early reviewers about Google Scholar's effectiveness.

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative evaluation of Google Scholar and 11 other bibliographic databases (Academic Search Elite, AgeLine, ArticleFirst, EconLit, GEOBASE, MEDLINE, PAIS International, POPLINE, Social Sciences Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, and SocINDEX), focusing on search performance within the multidisciplinary field of later-life migration. The results of simple keyword searches are evaluated with reference to a set of 155 relevant articles identified in advance. In terms of both recall and precision, Google Scholar performs better than most of the subscription databases. This finding, based on a rigorous evaluation procedure, is contrary to the impressions of many early reviewers. The paper concludes with a discussion of a new approach to document relevance in educational settings—an approach that accounts for the instructors' goals as well as the students' assessments of relevance.

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