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Scholarly Impact Research Guide

This guide provides information and instruction on the different types of metrics used to evaluate and locate one's scholarly metrics.

Things to Consider...

Advantages

  • Much broader in scope: includes more than a traditional database including book chapters, posters, abstracts, patents, technical reports, etc. 
  • Indexing is more broad to include institutional repositories and other publicly available and open access forums
  • Coverage is earlier than 1976 (start date of Web of Science)
  • Better coverage of non-English language publications
  • Covers books which better reflect the work of scholars in Arts & Humanities
  • Multilingual and international

Disadvantages

  • Overinflated and inaccurate citation counts due to inclusions of Table of contents, promotional pages, course reading lists, etc
  • Can not request or make corrections to your own citations and cited works
  • More susceptible to gaming 
  • Can not eliminate self-citations in citation count
  • Updated less often - Monthly on average
  • Limited search features
  • Difficult to export citations

Using Google Scholar

In order to conduct a citation analysis of an authors work, the author must create a Google Scholar Profile. 

A profile will allow the author to create a unique identity and then link their work to their profile thereby allowing Google scholar to create an h-index and formulate a citation count.

Create a Google Scholar Profile

1- Click on " My Citations" at the top of the screen

2- Enter in as much relevant information as possible so you can be identifiable. 

3- Click on "Add" to locate articles, books, technical reports, and patents which you can link to your account

 

Once a Google Scholar Profile it is very easy to find the h-index and list of cited articles. 

1- Conduct a search by the author name

2- Select the author's profile

3- On the right-hand side of the screen you will see a table with metric information

In the Google Scholar Profile. Click on "Follow" to receive alerts

Publish or Perish is a free tool that pulls the citation information from Google Scholar but allows for additional control and additional metrics. 

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