Who is the better at tracking citations? Google Scholar, Web of Science, or Scopus? Dean Giustini looks at an article in BioMedical Digital Libraries (BDL) entitled Three options for citation tracking: Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science. The paper makes some assumptions and is limited in some aspects. However, it does attempt to compare three unique citation tracking tools and according to Dean is still worth reading.

...So the winner is?
According to the article, "This study did not identify any one of these three resources as the answer to all citation tracking needs." OK sounds like a tie. But....
Dean clearly thinks Google Scholar is not the winner, "It seems obvious to librarians that Google Scholar is not a reliable citation tool." He did find WoS to be the "best indicator of citation counts for academic papers, across all disciplines." However he was unable to comment about Scopus because his library (UBC) does not subscribe to it. So does that mean we have tie, or has the tournament just eliminated one competitor and those remaining are left to slug it out in the finals? Hmm perhaps I have been watching too much World Cup.