Coverage of Business Administration Literature in Google Scholar: Analysis and Comparison with Econbiz, Scopus and Web of Science

Abstract

Google Scholar is used for literature research as well as for evaluations of research performance. To establish Google Scholar’s functional compliance we generate a heuristic method and apply it to business relevant journals, namely those ascertained and rated in VHB-JOURQUAL2 by Schrader/Hennig-Thurau (2009). This is done separately both for single rating categories and for special business research fields. It is shown that Google Scholar primarily indexes international, i.e. English-language journals with a high JOURQUAL rating; German-language literature is hardly covered systematically. In addition, we compare these results with the business journal content of EconBiz, Scopus and Web of Science. While Google Scholar is definitely competitive with Web of Science and Scopus for English-language literature, German-language literature is systematically covered by EconBiz, only. With regard to the journal coverage of some research areas, it becomes evident that EconBiz even dominates the databases Scopus and Web of Science.

A shortened version of this paper with other figures is published in Bibliometrie - Praxis und Theorie.

Keywords: bibliometric analyses, Google scholar, journal rating, literature databases, literature researches, performance measurement, scopus, VHB-JOURQUAL, web of science

JEL Classification: I23, L31, M19