  Academic institutions, federal agencies, publishers, editors, authors, and
librarians increasingly rely on citation analysis for making hiring, promotion,
tenure, funding, and/or reviewer and journal evaluation and selection
decisions. The Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) citation databases
have been used for decades as a starting point and often as the only tools for
locating citations and/or conducting citation analyses. ISI databases (or Web
of Science), however, may no longer be adequate as the only or even the main
sources of citations because new databases and tools that allow citation
searching are now available. Whether these new databases and tools complement
or represent alternatives to Web of Science (WoS) is important to explore.
Using a group of 15 library and information science faculty members as a case
study, this paper examines the effects of using Scopus and Google Scholar (GS)
on the citation counts and rankings of scholars as measured by WoS. The paper
discusses the strengths and weaknesses of WoS, Scopus, and GS, their overlap
and uniqueness, quality and language of the citations, and the implications of
the findings for citation analysis. The project involved citation searching for
approximately 1,100 scholarly works published by the study group and over 200
works by a test group (an additional 10 faculty members). Overall, more than
10,000 citing and purportedly citing documents were examined. WoS data took
about 100 hours of collecting and processing time, Scopus consumed 200 hours,
and GS a grueling 3,000 hours.
