Recently, Harzing's Publish or Perish software was updated to include Microsoft Academic Search as a second citation database search option for computing various citation-based metrics. This article explores the new search option by scoring 50 top economics and finance journals and comparing them with the results obtained using the original Google Scholar-based search option. The new database delivers significantly smaller scores for all metrics, but the rank correlations across the two databases for the h-index, g-index, AWCR, and e-index are significantly correlated, especially when the time frame is restricted to more recent years. Comparisons are also made to the Article Influence score from eigenfactor.org and to the RePEc h-index, both of which adjust for journal-level self-citations.

This paper investigates whether CiteULike and Mendeley are useful for measuring scholarly influence, using a sample of 1,613 papers published in Nature and Science in 2007. Traditional citation counts from the Web of Science (WoS) were used as benchmarks to compare with the number of users who bookmarked the articles in one of the two free online reference manager sites. Statistically significant correlations were found between the user counts and the corresponding WoS citation counts, suggesting that this type of influence is related in some way to traditional citation-based scholarly impact but the number of users of these systems seems to be still too small for them to challenge traditional citation indexes.

The launch of Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics may provoke a revolution in the research evaluation field as it places within every researchers reach tools that allow bibliometric measuring. In order to alert the research community over how easily one can manipulate the data and bibliometric indicators offered by Google s products we present an experiment in which we manipulate the Google Citations profiles of a research group through the creation of false documents that cite their documents, and consequently, the journals in which they have published modifying their H index. For this purpose we created six documents authored by a faked author and we uploaded them to a researcher s personal website under the University of Granadas domain. The result of the experiment meant an increase of 774 citations in 129 papers (six citations per paper) increasing the authors and journals H index. We analyse the malicious effect this type of practices can cause to Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics. Finally, we conclude with several deliberations over the effects these malpractices may have and the lack of control tools these tools offer