Scholar Blog
Google Scholar Citations
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Citation metrics are often used to gauge the influence of scholarly articles and authors. Some of you already track your citation metrics by regularly looking up your articles in Google Scholar. Many of you have asked us for an easier way to do this.
Today we’re introducing Google Scholar Citations: a simple way for you to compute your citation metrics and track them over time.
We use a statistical model based on author names, bibliographic data, and article content to group articles likely written by the same author. You can quickly identify your articles using these groups. After you identify your articles, we collect citations to them, graph these citations over time, and compute your citation metrics. Three metrics are available: the widely used
h-index
, the
i-10 index
, which is the number of articles with at least ten citations, and the total number of citations to your articles. We compute each metric over all citations as well as over citations in articles published in the last five years. These metrics are automatically updated as we find new citations to your articles on the web.
You can enable automatic addition of your newly published articles to your profile. This would instruct the Google Scholar indexing system to update your profile as it discovers new articles that are likely yours. And you can, of course, manually update your profile by adding missing articles, fixing bibliographic errors, and merging duplicate entries.
You can also create a public profile with your articles and citation metrics (e.g.,
Alex Verstak
,
Anurag Acharya
). If you make your profile public, it can appear in Google Scholar search results when someone searches for your name (e.g.,
Richard Feynman
,
Paul Dirac
). This will make it easier for your colleagues worldwide to follow your work.
Google Scholar Citations is currently in limited launch with a small number of users. This is a new direction for us and we plan to use the experience and feedback from the limited launch to improve the service. Click
here
and follow the instructions to get started. Keep in mind that this is a limited launch and we may not be able to accept new users when you click. If this happens, we’ll direct you to a sign-up page where you can register to be notified when Google Scholar Citations is available to all users. Meanwhile you can browse existing profiles (e.g.,
Albert Einstein
,
Margaret Mead
,
Alonzo Church
) and
learn more about Google Scholar Citations
.
Update:
We are not able to accept new users at this point. We invite you to
sign up
to be notified when Google Scholar Citations is available to all users.
Posted by: James Connor, Software Engineer
Work Locally, Search Globally
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Recently, I spent a month in Ghana working with NGOs and some government organizations. As a part of this, I visited a health research center in Dodowa, couple of hours from Accra. Staff members gather disease and demographics data from the district for research as well as for health policy recommendations.
The center is in the middle of farmlands with no access to landline phones - Internet access is via flaky mobile networks. When I introduced myself as an engineer working on Google Scholar, I expected I would need to describe Scholar at length and do some demos. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to see eyes light up with recognition. So, I talked to the staff members trying to understand how they use Scholar.
The research center maintains a digital library of scholarly articles related to malaria which is the biggest disease threat in the region. This library is used by researchers at the center as well as by a larger network of scientists interested in malaria. Alexander Nartey (program coordinator) curates the library and uses Scholar to discover newly published papers. Doris Sarpong (demographer/research officer) mentioned that the speed of Scholar helps her get her work done in spite of the limited connectivity. She also liked the ability to restrict results to recent papers. Alberta Amu Quartey (graduate student) works on the history of malaria serology. Scholar helped her find papers going as far back as the 1960s, many of them from Ghana and neighboring regions.
The simplest feedback I heard was from an older researcher who had been working in the field for a while. He liked that he could find anything anyone anywhere had discovered. He said, "A man who has never worn spectacles doesn't really know what he's missing". It is one thing to sit in a conference room in California and argue about Google Scholar features and algorithms and quite another to stand in an African village health center and hear in person what they make possible. Here is hoping Google Scholar can help more researchers in more places see further.
Posted by Mohit Rajani, Software Engineer
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