A plot of my citations in Google Scholar vs. Web of Science

There has been some discussion about whether Google Scholar or one of the proprietary software companies numbers are better for citation counts. I personally think Google Scholar is better for a number of reasons:

1. Higher numbers, but consistently/adjustably higher
2. It’s free and the data are openly available. 
3. It covers more ground (patents, theses, etc.) to give a better idea of global impact
4. It’s easier to use

I haven’t seen a plot yet relating Web of Science citations to Google Scholar citations, so I made one for my papers.

GS has about 41% more citations per paper than Web of Science. That is consistent with what other people have found. It also looks reasonably linearish. I wonder what other people’s plots would look like? 

Here is the R code I used to generate the plot (the names are Pubmed IDs for the papers):

library(ggplot2)

names = c(16141318,16357033,16928955,17597765,17907809,19033188,19276151,19924215,20560929,20701754,20838408, 21186247,21685414,21747377,21931541,22031444,22087737,22096506,22257669) 

y = c(287,122,84,39,120,53,4,52,6,33,57,0,0,4,1,5,0,2,0)

x = c(200,92,48,31,79,29,4,51,2,18,44,0,0,1,0,2,0,1,0)

Year = c(2005,2006,2007,2007,2007,2008,2009,2009,2011,2010,2010,2011,2012,2011,2011,2011,2011,2011,2012)

q <- qplot(x,y,xlim=c(-20,300),ylim=c(-20,300),xlab=”Web of Knowledge”,ylab=”Google Scholar”) + geom_point(aes(colour=Year),size=5) + geom_line(aes(x = y, y = y),size=2)