Informe Google Scholar i LISA: fortaleses i debilitats

Abstract

In this report, strengths and weaknesses of Google Scholar and LISA are identified and compared in order to resolve if our library should cancel or renew its LISA’s subscription. The comparison has been structured in three sections: databases content, information retrieval system aspects, and other relevant aspects of interest. Regarding methodology, some results exposed are extracted from factual data available online and others come from many exploratory and specific searches I have been making within the databases. In conclusion, on the one hand it is noted that while Google Scholar’s search fields may seem too general and insufficient leading to think it will not recover accurate results, they actually recover relevant documents in two case examples. However, Google Scholar indexes least library science journals than LISA, does not establish any criteria control for its content, does not incorporate any subject headings or Thesaurus as well as does not demarcate the number of contents added every week. On the other hand, while it is true that LISA has some weaknesses such as poor chronological coverage, consistency problems with authorities retrieval, unavailability of books, lack of finding similar documents, and few shortcomings regarding results recovery, these are not strong reasons enough to consider its subscription cancellation, since it offers a huge amount of journals to look through, its content goes through a quality check (it has a peer reviewed filter), there are really useful pre-search and post-search filters, as well as it allows truncation, which helps to recover more relevant results. In this way, I recommend renewing Lisa’s subscription.