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Medical literature searches: a comparison of P ub M ed and G oogle S cholar
Author(s) -
Nourbakhsh Eva,
Nugent Rebecca,
Wang Helen,
Cevik Cihan,
Nugent Kenneth
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
health information and libraries journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.779
H-Index - 38
eISSN - 1471-1842
pISSN - 1471-1834
DOI - 10.1111/j.1471-1842.2012.00992.x
Subject(s) - impact factor , relevance (law) , nonparametric statistics , medicine , information retrieval , combinatorics , library science , statistics , computer science , mathematics , chemistry , political science , law , biochemistry
Background Medical literature searches provide critical information for clinicians. However, the best strategy for identifying relevant high‐quality literature is unknown. Objectives We compared search results using P ub M ed and G oogle S cholar on four clinical questions and analysed these results with respect to article relevance and quality. Methods Abstracts from the first 20 citations for each search were classified into three relevance categories. We used the weighted kappa statistic to analyse reviewer agreement and nonparametric rank tests to compare the number of citations for each article and the corresponding journals' impact factors. Results Reviewers ranked 67.6% of P ub M ed articles and 80% of G oogle S cholar articles as at least possibly relevant ( P = 0.116) with high agreement (all kappa P ‐values < 0.01). Google Scholar articles had a higher median number of citations (34 vs. 1.5, P < 0.0001) and came from higher impact factor journals (5.17 vs. 3.55, P = 0.036). Conclusions P ub M ed searches and G oogle S cholar searches often identify different articles. In this study, G oogle S cholar articles were more likely to be classified as relevant, had higher numbers of citations and were published in higher impact factor journals. The identification of frequently cited articles using G oogle S cholar for searches probably has value for initial literature searches.