An Investigation of Citations Pattern to Iranian's English Journals Using Google Scholar & ISI: Do They Differ?

This study examines the differences between Web of Science and Google Scholar in the citation counting, citation ranking of 7 Iranian's English Journals indexed in JCR, and investigates whether there is any relationship between their impact factors, number of articles and the rate of citations they get. Furthermore, their visibility in international level is determined. According to the findings, there is not any significant difference between the citations rate in GS and ISI. Among these journals JISC received the most citations in ISI WOS and IJER received the most citations in GS. In both GS and WOS databases, the majority of citations to the articles came from Asia, Europe, and America respectively and the minimum rate of citations related to Africa and Australia in GS and WOS orderly. In country level, in both databases the most rate of citations were journal self citations and related to Iran, in GS it followed by US and UK but in WOS it followed by India and china. In GS there is a negative relationship between the number of Citations and the number of articles. Unlike in Google Scholar database, the correlation between citations and journal impact factor is significant in ISI database. It means that the more the impact factor a journal had the more citations it received in ISI database; but this fact is not true in GS database.