Scientific impact quantity and quality: Analysis of two sources of bibliographic data

I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day about what would happen if Google used some of their newly acquired cash reserves to purchase Thompson/ISI and their Web of Knowledge citation database and added those citations to Scholar.

I can't begin to fully understand this analysis from a professor at UC San Diego, but it seems that it might not even be necessary.

Until recently, Thompson/ISI has provided the only
source of large-scale “inverted” bibliographic data of the sort
required for impact analysis. In the end of 2004, Google intro-
duced a new service, GoogleScholar, making much of this same
data available. Here we analyze 203 publications, collectively
cited by more than 4000 other publications. We show surpris-
ingly good agreement between data citation counts provided by
the two services. Data quality across the systems is analyzed,
and potentially useful complementarities between are considered.
The additional robustness offered by multiple sources of such
data promises to increase the utility of these measurements as
open citation protocols and open access increase their impact on
electronic scientific publication practices.