Where Google Scholar stands on art: an evaluation of content coverage in online databases

Abstract

This study evaluates the content coverage of Google Scholar, as it compares to three bibliographic databases – Arts & humanities citation index, Bibliography of the history of art and Art full text/Art index retrospective – on the subject of art history. The comparison reveals that it indexes roughly one-third of the 470 tested articles, dwarfed by the Arts & humanities citation index’s 73% coverage. Additionally, 64% of the 157 articles retrieved in Google Scholar are ‘citation-only’ records that contain incomplete bibliographic data and lack direct links to the abstracts or full text of the articles.