RESEARCH ARTICLE
Using Search Engine Count Estimates as Indicators of Academic Impact: A Web-based Replication of Haggbloom et al.’s (2002) Study
Matthias Spörrle1, *, Andranik Tumasjan2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2011Volume: 4
First Page: 12
Last Page: 18
Publisher ID: TOPSYJ-4-12
DOI: 10.2174/1874350101104010012
Article History:
Received Date: 28/06/2010Revision Received Date: 16/05/2011
Acceptance Date: 25/05/2011
Electronic publication date: 13/7/2011
Collection year: 2011
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Using a complex set of quantitative and qualitative indicators of scientific importance, Haggbloom et al. [1] compiled a ranking of the most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. The present study set out to replicate this rankordered list using simple search engine count estimates (SECEs) obtained from three popular internet search engines. In line with our expectations, our results revealed a small, but significant relationship between SECEs and the existing offline ranking when the query specified the scientist’s field of research (i.e., psychology). Our results imply that SECEs may be considered easy to apply indicators of a researcher’s impact.