RESEARCH: THEORY AND APPLICATIONS Pointing Users Toward Citation Searching: Using Google Scholar and Web of Science

tion Index and later its successor, Web of Science. For almost half a century, these were the only available tools for tracing scholarly discourse forward in time. Now there are two new tools. SCOPUS is a commercial product from Elsevier and was launched in November 2004. Google Scholar also arrived on the scene in November 2004. Because Google Scholar is freely accessible from the Google site, students and faculty are finding and using it. They are beginning to ask librarians for their professional opinions of its efficacy. Practicing reference and instruction librarians need to understand the strengths of both Google Scholar and Web of Science so that they can appropriately recommend them for use by their patrons—whether they are undergraduates, graduate students, or faculty. Since April 2005, 10 studies have been published that directly compare the citation features of Google Scholar to those of Web of Science. In an effort to better understand the advantages and disadvantages of these tools, the author undertook an investigatio