Google Scholar: Highly Comprehensive Coverage... Inside a Hermetic Black Box

Google Scholar (GS) is a freely-accessible and widely used academic search engine that indexes academic literature from a broad range of disciplines, document types, and languages. A considerable number of studies have tried to analyse the main characteristics of GS, despite its general lack of transparency (or perhaps because of it). This talk will provide an overview of GS's known strengths and weaknesses as a source bibliographic and citation data, including comparisons with other similar sources. In addition, several prototype web applications that utilize data from GS for bibliometric purposes (at the journal and author levels) will be presented. The talk will end with a discussion on whether GS data can be sustainably collected and reused for a variety of purposes.