Some measures for comparing citation databases

Citation analysis was traditionally based on data from the ISI Citation indexes. Now with the appearance of Scopus, and with the free citation tool Google Scholar methods and measures are need for comparing these tools. In this paper we propose a set of measures for computing the similarity between rankings induced by ordering the retrieved publications in decreasing order of the number of citations as reported by the specific tools. The applicability of these measures is demonstrated and the results show high similarities between the rankings of the ISI Web of Science and Scopus and lower similarities between Google Scholar and the other tools. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.