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July 21st, 2011

Google Scholar Citations: a way for academics to compute citation metrics and track them over time

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Blog Admin

July 21st, 2011

Google Scholar Citations: a way for academics to compute citation metrics and track them over time

7 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Citation metrics are used by many academics and researchers to gauge the influence of their work, and to gain a better understanding of the impact of their research. The Impact Blog has already given a lot of coverage to Anne- Wil Harzing’s Publish or Perish software, and now it looks as if Google may be catching up… after feedback from users, Google are now introducing Google Scholar Citations, which aims to be a simple way for academics to compute citation metrics and track them over time.

Google Scholar Citations “will use a statistical model based on author names, bibliographic data, and article content to group articles likely written by the same author”. Users can then identify articles using these groups. After identifying all your own articles, Google will 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. Google compute each metric over all citations as well as over citations in articles published in the last five years. These metrics are then automatically updated as Google find new citations to your articles on the internet.

Academics will be able to create a public profile with their articles and citation metrics, examples of which can be viewed on the Google Scholar Citations blog. Users can enable automatic addition of their newly published articles to their profile, or alternatively  manually update their profiles by adding missing articles, fixing bibliographic errors, and merging duplicate entries. If you make your profile public, it can appear in Google Scholar search results when someone searches for your name, making it easier for your colleagues worldwide to follow your work.

Google Scholar Citations is currently in limited launch with a small number of users, and will be eventually rolled out to everybody. Until then, the profiles of Albert EinsteinMargaret MeadAlonzo Church and others are available to browse, and more information on the system is available on the Google Scholar Citations page.

See our follow up blog post with added examples and images: First impressions of Google Scholar Citations are good: it’s easy to use and accurate

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