Google Books, Scopus, Microsoft Academic, and Mendeley for impact assessment of doctoral dissertations: A multidisciplinary analysis of the UK

A research doctorate normally culminates in publishing a dissertation reporting a substantial body of novel work. In the absence of a suitable citation index, this article explores the relative merits of alternative methods for the large-scale assessment of dissertation impact, using 150,740 UK doctoral dissertations from 2009–2018. Systematic methods for this were designed for Google Books, Scopus, Microsoft Academic, and Mendeley. Fewer than 1 in 8 UK doctoral dissertations had at least one Scopus (12%), Microsoft Academic (11%), or Google Books citation (9%), or at least one Mendeley reader (5%). These percentages varied substantially by subject area and publication year. Google Books citations were more common in the Arts and Humanities (18%), whereas Scopus and Microsoft Academic citations were more numerous in Engineering (24%). In the Social Sciences, Google Books (13%) and Scopus (12%) citations were important and in Medical Sciences, Scopus and Microsoft Academic citations to dissertations were rare (6%). Few dissertations had Mendeley readers (from 3% in Science to 8% in the Social Sciences) and further analysis suggests that Google Scholar finds more citations, but does not report information about all dissertations within a repository and is not a practical tool for large-scale impact assessment.