Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Google Scholar in Author's Information Retrieval

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the role of Google Scholar effectiveness in the retrieval of the most cited author's information and publications under different name versions.
This research was applied and has been done under the Survey-Descriptive method. Data collection was done through the field and library methods. The study population included 10 most cited authors in 5 fields which were gathered from In-cite webpage through non-probability sampling method. Different versions of the author's name retrieval were adjusted to his publications’ check list.
Findings: The recall result of the 12 variables (The formula used to search author's names) showed that only 4 out of 10 cases were above than the recall average and precision in all of the variables, were below the average level. Friedman test was prioritized for the recall and precision average factors which showed that no variable is better than the other. The results of the student test for measuring the independence of 1 to 6 variables (different names of authors without limiting to a subject) showed that there were not any differences between these two categories of variables but the precision in 1to 6 variables (different names of authors without limiting a subject) is higher than the name limitations of the subjects. Overall, the results suggested that Google Scholar which is used to retrieve the various versions of authors’ names is usually not desirable.