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Commentary to Gusenbauer and Haddaway 2020: Evaluating retrieval qualities of Google Scholar and PubMed
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Commentary to Gusenbauer and Haddaway 2020: Evaluating retrieval qualities of Google Scholar and PubMed

D. V. Klopfenstein and Will Dampier
Research synthesis methods, v 12(2), pp 126-135
08 Oct 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/jrsm.1456
PMID: 33031632
url
https://doi.org/10.1002/jrsm.1456View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)CC BY-NC-ND V4.0,  Open

Abstract

bibliometrics Commentaries manuscripts as topic MEDLINE open access publishing publications PubMed reproducibility search engine
We read with considerable interest the study by Gusenbauer and Haddaway (Gusenbauer and Haddaway, 2020, Research Synthesis Methods, doi:10.1002/jrsm.1378) comparing the systematic search qualities of 28 search systems, including Google Scholar (GS) and PubMed. Google Scholar and PubMed are the two most popular free academic search tools in biology and chemistry, with GS being the number one search tool in the world. Those academics using GS as their principal system for literature searches may be unaware of research which enumerates five critical features for scientific literature tools that greatly influenced Gusenbauer's 2020 study. Using this list as the framework for a targeted comparison between just GS and PubMed, we found stark differences which overwhelmingly favored PubMed. In this comment, we show that by comparing the characteristics of the two search tools, features that are particularly useful in one search tool, but are missing in the other, are strikingly spotlighted. One especially popular feature that ubiquitously appears in GS, but not in PubMed, is the forward citation search found under every citation as a clickable Cited by N link. We seek to improve the PubMed search experience using two approaches. First, we request that PubMed add Cited by N links, making them as omnipresent as the GS links. Second, we created an open‐source command‐line tool, pmidcite , which is used alongside PubMed to give information to researchers to help with the choice of the next paper to examine, analogous to how GS's Cited by N links help to guide users. Find pmidcite at https://github.com/dvklopfenstein/pmidcite .

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