Assessing researchers' performance in developing countries : is Google Scholar an alternative?

This article compares the representation of 10 purposefully selected LIS researchers \nin South Africa in Google Scholar (GS), Thomson Scientific’s (herein referred to as \nISI – Institute for Scientific Information) citation indexes, and Elsevier’s Scopus, in \norder to determine whether or not Google Scholar is an alternative tool for evaluating \nresearch in developing countries, particularly those situated in Sub-Saharan Africa. \nThree indicators, namely the number of publications, the number of citations and the \nh-index, were used to measure the similarity or dissimilarity between the three databases/ \nservices in the coverage of South Africa’s LIS documents. The data was also subjected \nto a Pearson correlation analysis to examine the relationship between GS and ISI, GS \nand Scopus and ISI and Scopus. Results show that GS covers more publications and \ncitations than ISI and Scopus. There is a stronger correlation between GS and Scopus \nthan there is between GS and ISI. We conclude that GS is an alternative service, but \nshould be cautiously used when evaluating research in developing countries. Areas for \nfurther research are also recommended.