Comparison of ISI web of knowledge, SCOPUS, and Google Scholar h-indices of Iranian nuclear medicine scientists

Introduction: In the current study, we compared the h-indices of Web of Science (WOS), SCOPUS, and GS of the Iranian nuclear medicine scientists Methods: Full time members of two major nuclear medicine research centers of Iran with more than 5 year of experience (Nuclear Medicine Research Center of Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, and Research Institute for Nuclear Medicine of Tehran University of Medical Sciences) were included for h-index evaluation. H-indices of SCOPUS, WOS and GS were retrieved using their specific websites. Correlations of h-indices with each other were evaluated using spearman correlation coefficient. Results: Overall 11 researchers were included in the study. SCOPUS, WOS, and GS provided somehow different h-indices for each researcher. Spearman's correlation coefficients between different h-indices were high: 0.834, 0.817, 0.857 between SCOPUS and WOS, SCOPUS and GS, and GS and WOS respectively. Rankings of researchers according to different database however, were acceptably identical. Conclusion: H-indices provided by SCOPUS, Web of Science WOS, and Google Scholar (GS) for Iranian nuclear medicine researchers can be used interchangeably. However these h-indices can be different according to which database is used. Setting up "ReasercherID" in WOS and "User profile" in GS, as well as giving regular feedback to SCOPUS managers can increase the accuracy of h-indices calculation.