Google Scholar for bibliometrics
Worksheet
Time required: around 45 minutes
This worksheet provides detailed worked examples and can be used for introductory level training
It is based on the use of Google Scholar with the Publish or Perish software, freely available to download
It covers use of Google Scholar as a bibliometric assessment tool for individuals and also its use for journal
ranking
Please explore the other MyRI items that can be used with this practical worksheet –
other worksheets, online tutorial, posters, datasheets, product profiles and booklet
Website: http://www.ndlr.ie/myri/
Last edited: 02 May 2011
For your notes:
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Part One
Google Scholar for personal bibliometric assessment
Section One
Publication counts for an author
Obtaining an accurate list of author publications is quite tricky and various products provide tools to
assist with this, and also give very different lists as they are based on different data sources.
Publication counts are widely given as a metric for authors but are of quite limited value in that they do
not give any real indication of use or impact of the research (is it actually read and cited at all? ) Of
themselves they also do not indicate how the publication rate compares to the average for the research
area which varies so much across fields.

You will need to have installed the free Publish or Perish software on your PC from
http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm and have internet access

Start the software
– all actions are done via the software interface (not your web
browser)

Choose the Author Impact tab (in older versions of the software this
is in a left panel) and input your author’s name.
It is important to include inverted
commas round names in order to keep initials/first names with surnames, so

Type in “F Convery” or “F J Convery” in the Author’s name box

Pick relevant subject areas, uncheck subjects as below

Click the Lookup button
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
(NB: searching for “F Convery” has the same effect as searching for “Convery f”)

There are no other filtering and refining tools available, and this list probably has
papers by the wrong author included in it still
 So you have to go through the list and uncheck any articles not by
your author– re-sort your results by clicking on the Author column
heading to facilitate this checking for the correct author

Note there are often more items returned in Google Scholar than products like Scopus
and Web of Science. There is no published list of what is indexed but things like
repositories will likely return duplicates of the publisher versions of articles. Book
publisher catalogues are included and many government and NGO sites and patent
sites also.

Adjust the column widths so you can see the publisher column

Sort your author list by Publisher by clicking on the Publisher column
heading

Scroll down through the publisher column and you will see repositories and
academic websites along with journal publisher sites

Whilst having many versions of a publication makes Google Scholar a good source of
citation information, as a source of lists of publications quite a lot of tidying up and deduplicating of titles will likely be needed – Sort your list by Title now by
clicking on the Title column heading and you will see many items listed 2 or 3
times here for the same title. If checking on an applicant for a post this means that you
cannot simply do an author look-up in PoP and assume a publication count of 213 = 213
separate research outputs
 Merge duplicates to get a better list of publications. Drag an item to
drop it onto another.
The number of publications will reduce but the number of
citations for the individual item will aggregate.
 Unmerge items by right-clicking on the item and choosing Split
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Citations from the popup menu.

Explore the Copy> button to the right of the results screen as to ways to save the
publication list for the author
We return to the various citation metrics provided here below
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Section Two
Citation counts for individual items & cited reference searching
We now move on to the real core of Bibliometrics – citation analysis, starting with looking at citation
counts for individual articles from a researcher.

In section One you covered getting a list of an author’s research output in Google
Scholar. For those items listed in such a list under the Author Impact tab the number
of cites to the article or item are shown in the left column of display – and you can
click on the Cites column heading to sort items by numbers of cites
You can also use the General Citation Search option in the left panel as a direct way to
check on a single known reference for citations without having to create an author set first
1.
Click on the General citations tab
2.
Type in Kiniry as the author
3.
Type in The phrase box “Hands-on look at java mobile agents”
4.
Select Title words only
5.
Click on Lookup
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The record will be returned to you with the number of cites to it found in this databasenote there are various versions of the paper with different citation counts here but the
principal IEEE published journal article appears at the top of the list
Section Three
Citation analysis of an author set of publications
A number of metrics can be applied to a set of author publications rather than just getting a citation
count for each discrete piece of research. By far the most important is the author h-index and its variants
which are covered here.

In section One you learned how to get an accurate list of an author publications in
Google Scholar using the Publish or Perish software, checking and removing any false
hit records by scanning the result set

Repeat that process under the Author Impact tab
to obtain a list of
publications in Publish or Perish for a selected author Joseph Kiniry (Joseph R Kiniry, Joe
Kiniry, J Kiniry, Joseph Kiniry) who works in computer science- so limit the subject
choice to Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics

Scan the list and uncheck any papers you think may not be by this author – the metrics
re-calculate as you do that, but these seem to be all by our author

Click on the Cites column heading to sort by citation rates with the highest first
and scroll back to the top of the list to see some documents with very high citation rates
– and the author h-index displays above the references
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
At the top of the summary results is a very wide range of metrics regarding these
papers and this author:

Among them are: total papers, total cites, average cites per year and per paper

Also given is the h-index for the author

A range of variants to the h-index is provided each trying to correct one or more
limitations of the original, such as the following which you can explore:
o
g-index giving more weight to highly cited articles. Because this author has a
few really highly cited papers this is very high in his case compared to the hindex which does not give any extra “credit” for such high citation rates
o
Zhang’s e-index which attempts to allow for the overall surplus of citations
about the h-index point – again very high for this author
o
Hc-index, Contemporary H index, which provides lower weighting to research
that was done some time ago i.e. is the researcher currently active?
o
HI-index, individual h-index, which gives higher weighting to cites to singleauthor publications
o
AW-index, Age weighted index, allows for the fact the more recent publications
have had less chance for citation rates to build up
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PartTwo
Google Scholar for journal ranking
Journal h-index is the only journal ranking tool available with Google Scholar and Publish or Perish
1. Start the Publish or Perish software

Download and install the free Publish or Perish software from
http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm

Start the software – all actions are done via the software interface (not your web
browser)
2. Search for the journal title of interest

Click on the Journal Impact tab
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 In the Journal Title box, type in the journal title of interest –
“Review of Finance”

Enclose title words that must appear together with double quotes

Limit to one subject area to try to limit the number of results you have to filter out from
other similar journal titles
Untick the boxes to the right so that Business, Administration,
Finance, Economics; and Social Sciences…are the only subject
categories selected

You should also limit to a certain year range because PoP can only cope with 1,000
articles at a time and for some journals there will certainly be more than this over a few
years – limit to 3 or 4 years and if over 1,000 results are still returned narrow the year
range further and repeat the search – a box will pop up and warn you if this happens
Type in 2008 to 2010 in the year ranges

Check you have settings as below, then click on the Lookup button
After a short pause you see all documents from Review of Finance indexed and cited for
the period 2008-2010 – but that may not be all you have, so move on to the next
session for essential further checking and filtering of results
3. Check and filter out any incorrect journal titles in the result list

Click on the Publications column heading to get results sorted and
listing by publication – this makes a manual check easier for you
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
Scan the whole list of resulting articles, looking at the Publication
column content
Searching for “Review of Finance” will find title words in that order and therefore
has retrieved Brazilian Review of Finance, International Review of Finance, amongst
others. Unfortunately there are no options to do an exact title search to avoid this
problem

Un-tick unwanted entries in the left Cites column
You can do this by marking up the whole block (click on the first
unwanted entry which will be highlighted in blue, move to the last
unwanted entry and hold down shift and click and the whole block
is highlighted. Then choose in the right column “Uncheck
selection”
Or you can uncheck each one individually in the left hand cites
column
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4. View the h-index for the journal and year range
 View h-index for the journal title Review of Finance for the year range
2008-2010 at the top of the display
The metrics including journal h-index will be recalculated without the unticked entries
As previously mentioned journal h-index focuses on the number of articles from the journal
that have a high number of citations. The h-index for this journal title for 2008-2010 is
about 22
This means that there are 22 articles from this journal with 22 or more citations to
them
There are many other metrics provided for this journal as well that can be explored
Part Three
Managing and re-running queries
The Multi-Query Center page on Publish or Perish contains a list of recently run queries. It allows
you to add further queries, organise queries into folders and to re-run queries.
1. Start the Publish or Perish software

You will need to have installed the free Publish or Perish software on your PC from
http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm and have internet access

Start the software – all actions are done via the software interface (not your web
browser)
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2. Setting up a query for current and future analysis

Click on the Multi-Query center tab

Click on All Queries

Click on the New Folder icon

A Query Folder Properties box will appear. In the Folder name box,
type in “rite of spring”.

Click on OK

Ensure that the rite of spring folder is highlighted. This will mean that your search
results will automatically populate this folder

Click on the New Query icon.
 In the Query Properties box, type in the title of the item you are
interested in, ensuring that the Title words only box is ticked –
“Russian folk melodies in the rite of spring” as shown below
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
Click OK, and then when asked Do you want to perform a lookup for
the new query?, click on Yes
 Repeat the above steps for the following additional titles:
“The rite of spring genesis of a masterpiece”
“Jeux de nombres automated rhythm in the rite of spring”
 Highlight each of the titles to view the metrics
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
To update the metrics at a future date, mark all items that you wish
to update. Right click your mouse and then select Lookup
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3. Exporting results for further processing

Highlight the items you want to export

Right click your mouse and make your selection from the menu e.g.
Copy statistics for Excel
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