Research Impact Metrics: Citation Analysis

Introduction

Google Scholar  has both benefits and limitations when it comes to citation analysis. 

Benefits:

• It's free
• It's fast
• Most likely, it will offer a greater number of documents citing a work.
• The content is almost limitless. The Google Scholar database will include everything that has been cited by another work on the web and can be collected by Google.

Limitations:

• It may be necessary to search multiple spelling variations of an author's name in order to locate works by that individual. 
• Any citation by another article, whether scholarly or not, will be included in the times cited list.  The list can include blog posts, syllabuses, or anything else mentioned in scholarly articles. If you want to find out if a journal is peer-reviewed, look up the title in the library database Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory, and see if the title is listed as "refereed."
• The search results for each version of an article include duplicate entries, so there may be duplicate counts of cited articles as well. 
• Compared to Scopus and Web of Science, Google Scholar provides only very basic citation analysis options. 

Finding the Number of Times an Article has Been Cited

In Google Scholar, the easiest way to analyze citation counts is to find the number of times a particular article has been cited.

In general, it appears that the number of times an article has been cited is given weight and the most cited articles are listed at the top. 

Using Google Scholar Citations

The Google Scholar Citations option was added in November, 2011. By using this service, authors can compute citation metrics and track them over time. Citations in Google Scholar have the same caveats as citation searching in Google Scholar, so check the information in the previous box to learn more about them. 

Go to Google Scholar and click on the My Citations link to create your own profile with Google Scholar Citations.

Select the articles or groups of articles you wish to track. (Google Scholar suggests articles for your profile, but you can also search and add articles). In the future, you can edit or delete the articles in your profile or add new articles.

You can either have Google Scholar automatically update your profile or you can manually add articles to your profile.

When you choose to have Google automatically add citations to your profile, be aware that Google Scholar frequently misidentifies authors with similar names. Make sure you review your profile periodically and remove any inappropriate citations. 

Finding an Author Profile

Each researcher is responsible for setting up his or her own Google Scholar profile. Therefore, you will not be able to view the profiles of all authors listed in Google Scholar. There are two ways to find an author's profile. 

• You can search by author name. There will be a link to the author's profile at the top of the list of results if he or she has created one.

• In Google Scholar, you can view a profile of any author whose name is underlined in a citation. To see that author's profile, perform a keyword search. 

Finding an Author's Most Cited Paper

The research cited in an author profile is sorted so that the most cited research appears at the top. By clicking the appropriate column heading, articles can be re-sorted by title or date published.

Google Scholar does not offer the option to find the most cited article authored by a specific author unless the author has created a citation profile.