FINDING YOUR RESEARCH & CITATION IMPACT IN GOOGLE SCHOLAR
track citations to your work
You can easily track your citations and see who has been using your work by looking up your papers in the Google scholar by creating a profile on google scholar
Google Scholar is an online, freely accessible search engine that searches a wide variety of sources, including academic publishers, universities, and preprint depositories looking for: Peer-reviewed articles.
Google Scholar uses H-index to determine the citation impact of the author
- "An index that quantifies both the actual scientific productivity and the apparent scientific impact of a scientist."
- eg. An h-index of 25 means the researcher has 25 papers, each of which has been cited 25+ times.
STEP 1: SET UP A PROFILE ON GOOGLE SCHOLAR TO TRACK YOUR CITATIONS
- Go to the Google Scholar Citations Profile:
- Create a profile in Google Scholar,
- Search Google Scholar for articles you have published, and
- Calculate your h-index based on the list of your publications
OR
- Log in to your google (gmail) account,
- Go to the Google Scholar Citations Profile
- Create a profile of all your articles captured in Google Scholar.
- Follow the prompt on the screen to set up your profile.
- Once complete, this will show all the times the articles have been cited by other documents in Google Scholar and your h-index will be provided. Its your choice whether you make your profile public or private but if you make it public, you can link to it from your own webpages.
STEP 2: search for journal impact factor on google scholar
Register for a Google account or log in by using your Gmail account details.
- Go to Google Scholar.
- Click the My Citationslink in the top navigation bar.
- Follow the prompts to register your profile.
- Search Google Scholar for articles you have published, and
- Calculate your h-index based on the list of your publications
- You can arrange for Google Scholar to send you an email each time it indexes a publication by an author with your name.
STEP 3: search for journal impact factor on publish or perish software (POP)
- Download and install Publish or Perish software
- Publish or Perish Software Searches Google Scholar.
- After searching by your name, deselect from the list of articles retrieved those that you did not author.
- Your h-index will appear at the top of the tool.
- Note: This tool must be downloaded to use
STEP 4: SEARCHING FOR ARTICLES
- Select advanced search options (drop-down arrow to the right of search box).
- Enter the author's name in the "Return articles authored by" field, placing quotes around the name. Since some sources indexed in Google Scholar use initials only, it is advisable to search using variations such as "j smith" and "ja smith".
- You may also want to enter data into other fields to focus your search on a specific article.
- Click on Search Scholar.
- Locate the correct article in the search results list.
- If the article was cited by others, you will see a "Cited by" link at the bottom of the record. Follow this link to view the articles that cited this article.
- For more information about searching see Google Scholar's Help pages
USING GOOGLE SCHOLAR FOR THE H-INDEX
Benefits
- Covers a wider range of sources, (especially conferences, technical reports and eprints).
- Easier to calculate some of the less common metrics (since it is not linked to proprietary data).
Disadvantages
- Maybe considered a less authoritarian resources than Web of Science.
- More difficult to search when there are multiple authors with the same family name & initials-limited options to refine
- There may be duplication of results, so check carefully.
- Coverage is primarily medical, scientific, and technical.
- Coverage is primarily English language.
ISSUES TO BE AWARE OF:
- When comparing impact factors you need to compare similar authors in the same discipline, using the same database, using the same method.
- Be sure to indicate limitations.
- In general you can only compare values within a single discipline. Different citation patterns will mean, for example, an average medical researcher will generally have much larger h-index value than a world-class mathematician.
- The h-index may be less useful in some disciplines, particularly some areas of the humanities.