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In the classical core areas of natural and life sciences, bibliometric methods have become an integral part of research evaluation. In the humanities and social sciences, these methods for the assessment of research performance are (so far) less common. The current study takes a concrete example in an attempt to evaluate a research institute from the area of social sciences and humanities with the help of data from Google Scholar (GS). In order to use GS for a bibliometric study, we have developed procedures for the normalisation of citation impact, building on the procedures of classical bibliometrics. In order to test the convergent validity of the normalized citation impact scores, we have calculated normalized scores for a subset of the publications based on data from the WoS or Scopus. Even if scores calculated with the help of GS and WoS/Scopus are not identical for the different publication types (considered here), they are so similar that they result in the same assessment of the institute investigated in this study: The institute’s papers whose journals are covered in WoS are cited at about an average rate (compared with the other papers in the journals). Whereas the papers whose journals are not covered in WoS, and the book chapters, are cited about 20 to 40% above the average, the conference papers are cited twice as often as one would expect for the papers from the same conference.

Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) was proposed by Marx, Bornmann, Barth, and Leydesdorff (2014, [18]) to identify seminal publications in a research field which are most important in a historical context. We refined our RPYS toolbox by adding some features to the existing programs and we developed two new routines. First, a direct comparison of the results of different RPYSs is now possible, because the software transforms the results of the RPYS into percentiles for standardization. Second, we added routines that facilitate the user with retrieving the most-cited publications in specific years indicated by peaks in the spectrograms. Cited references can be aggregated across misspellings and variants. For this paper, two examples from the humanities and natural sciences are provided to demonstrate the functionalities and results of the programs. A more technical description of the usage of the programs can be found at http://www.leydesdorff.net/software/rpys/.