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Citation Analysis: Google Scholar

Tools to measure how a particular researcher or journal is cited.

Using Google Scholar to Find Citing Publications

Google Scholar covers articles, theses, books, abstracts, court opinions and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research, and may include pre-prints and web-published reports as well as published literature.  Since Google Scholar indexes information from multiple sources (provided by publishers, included in databases such as PubMed, found on the public web, etc.), there is no comprehensive list of what publications it covers.  However, for many fields, the greater number of publication formats included means that Google Scholar may find citations that were not discovered in Web of Science.

To search for citing publications in Google Scholar, you may want to start with a search for your researchers name.  To get the best results that include various ways they may be cited, search all variations of the name within quotation marks, preceded by author: For example, to search for citations to Peter Linebaugh's work, search for

author:"P Linebaugh" OR author:"Peter Linebaugh"

Results will be listed (generally) with the most-cited publications first.  To see the list of citing documents, click on 'Cited by #' below an entry to display all citing documents. Google Scholar will attempt to group all versions of a single work into one entry and combine the citations, but please note that it is not always able to do so, and you may see additional entried (with citations) to a work.  See the examples in red boxes in the figure below.

(Click to enlarge)

Search Google Scholar

Google Scholar Search

Scholarometer Web Site

Scholarometer is a FireFox browser add-on that facilitates using Google Scholar data in citation analysis.

It allows one to compute commonly used statistics, including the h-index, for individual scholars.  One of the benefits of this software is that you can delete incorrect data or merge entries found on Google Scholar for a more accurate analysis.

Publish or Perish Software

Publish or Perish is a piece of software that creates a citation report using the data from Google Scholar.  It is available in Windows and Linux versions.  Among other metrics, it can report:

  • Total number of papers
  • Total number of citations
  • Average number of citations per paper
  • Average number of citations per author
  • Average number of papers per author
  • Average number of citations per year
  • Hirsch's h-index and related parameters