Measuring the impact of digital heritage collections using Google Scholar

Abstract

This study aimed to measure the impact of digital heritage collections by analysing the citations received in scholarly outputs. Google Scholar was used to retrieve the scholarly outputs citing Memòria Digital de Catalunya (MDC), a cooperative, open-access repository containing digitized collections related to Catalonia and its heritage. The number of documents citing MDC has grown steadily since the creation of the repository in 2006. Most citing documents are scholarly outputs in the form of articles, proceedings and monographs, and academic theses and dissertations. Citing documents mainly pertain to the humanities and the social sciences and are in local languages. The most cited MDC collection contains digitized ancient Catalan periodicals. The study shows that Google Scholar is a suitable tool for providing evidence of the scholarly impact of digital heritage collections. Google Scholar indexes the full-text of documents, facilitating the retrieval of citations inserted in the text or in sections that are not the final list of references. It also indexes document types, such as theses and dissertations, which contain a significant share of the citations to digital heritage collections.