Citation searching has been available for decades, although in a limited form. This article discusses the advantages and limitations of searching by cited references, and also some alternatives in searching for cited references, before presenting a case study involving citation searching in...

Purpose – To identify the pros and the cons of Google Scholar. Design/methodology/approach – Chronicles the recent history of the Google Scholar search engine from its inception in November 2004 and critiques it with regard to its merits and demerits. Findings – Feels that there are...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the growing importance of information available when searching for cited papers Design/methodology/approach – Looks at the different formats available when searching for cited papers and how these formats can be manipulated to provide more...

Purpose – To compare the performance of different search engines, highlighting the overlap and rank differences. Design/methodology/approach – Presents results of an overlap test search series among traditional CD‐ROM indexing/abstracting databases since the mid‐1980s, web databases, and...

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to look into relevance ranking and its importance in trying to bring some order to the deluge of results in response to a query. Design/methodology/approach – A large‐scale analysis of detailed web logs of various search engines was performed....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss dubious hit counts in search results. Design/methodology/approach – Uses not only traditional databases and search engines but also unique citation databases to gain informative hit figures. Findings – Searches are finding materials that...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine clustering search results. Traditionally, search results from professional online information services presented the results in reverse chronological order. Later, relevance ranking was introduced for ordering the display of the hits on the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine clustering search results. Design/methodology/approach – Compares the clustering features of Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar extensively. Findings – Producers who offer clustering, despite certain deficiencies, deserve...

Purpose – This purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the problems that exist with Google Scholar, particularly regarding content spam and citation spam. Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides an analysis of how Google Scholar has been duped by real but manipulated documents...

Purpose – This paper aims to look at the pros and cons of Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) from a bibliometric perspective. Design/methodology/approach – This paper describes the major content and software features of MAS, and its shortcomings. Findings – The paper recommends some further...