Abstract

  NCBI PubMed is the de facto bibliographic database for biosciences but has been shown to be insufficient for the purpose of systematic review and meta-analysis, which requires comprehensiveness. Among bibliographic databases, Google Scholar is most comprehensive. With arguments that PubMed, supplemented with Google Scholar, may be sufficient for a systematic review in biosciences; we reviewed 18 studies to determine whether a combination of PubMed and Google Scholar is sufficient. Current literature shows that the combined coverage of Google Scholar and PubMed is between 85% to 98% of the universe of bioscience articles, which may be sufficient. However, Google Scholar alone is not sufficient as the concordance between PubMed and Google Scholar is 30.3% with 20.3% of the articles unique to PubMed.

Keywords: Systematic Review; PubMed; Google Scholar

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Citation

Citation: Yun Hwee Teo and Maurice HT Ling. “A Systematic Review on the Sufficiency of PubMed and Google Scholar for Biosciences". Acta Scientific Medical Sciences 4.12 (2020): 03-08.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Yun Hwee Teo and Maurice HT Ling. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.