ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 2008 Scientific Productivity, Web Visibility and Citation Patterns in Sixteen Nordic Sociology Departments Inari Aaltojärvi, Ilkka Arminen, Otto Auranen and Hanna-Mari Pasanen Department of Sociology and Social Psychology and Institute for Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland abstract: Science is being published increasingly on the web. In this article, we explore how Nordic sociology is represented on Google Scholar (GS), what its output and impact is, and what factors explain it. Our data consist of faculty in 16 Nordic sociology departments in March 2005. The distribution of their publications and citations is skewed. Thirteen per cent of scholars do not appear on GS, whereas only 15 per cent have more than 5 publications. Of scholars with at least 1 publica- tion (n = 240), 75 per cent have at most 10 citations. Both the number of web hits (web visibility) and citations are influenced by the gender of the faculty member, type and age of publication. Web visibility, citations and position are mutually rein- forcing. Departmental effect is greater in web visibility than citations. International publications have started to dominate the social sciences, international monographs being particularly frequently cited. The remaining salience of books shows that sociology is still a distinct form of knowledge. The exclusive use of refereed articles and direct comparisons with the natural sciences ignore important aspects of the social sciences. In all, while GS produces findings similar to those in citation data- bases such as the SSCI, some systematic differences exist. No individual method for measuring scientific output is objective. keywords: citation ◆ Google Scholar ◆ Nordic sociology ◆ scientific output ◆ scientific productivity ◆ Thomson scientific ◆ web visibility 1. Introduction The World Wide Web has become an important source of information in developed countries, and its importance is also growing in the developing world. Scientific communities are part of this development. Dissemination of scientific publications via the web is becoming more common, and scholars in information science have already been discussing the possibility of a web mention being comparable to a research citation for evaluating the impact of academic activity (Vaughan and Shaw, 2003: 1314–15; Kousha and Thelwall, 2007: 1056). During the history of the web, several search engines have been developed to help users find the infor- mation they need. In recent years, the Google search engine has held a leading position among web search engines because it covers more text documents on the web than other engines and is now the most popular among internet users (Notess, 2003; Sullivan, 2006). One of the latest applications introduced by Google Inc. is Google Scholar (GS) (http://scholar.google.com/), Acta Sociologica ◆ March 2008 ◆ Vol 51(1): 5–22 ◆ DOI: 10.1177/0001699307086815 Copyright © 2008 Nordic Sociological Association and SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) www.sagepublications.com