Research Impact: Google Scholar

1. You'll need a Google account before you can begin . Sign in with with a existing account or create one.
    
2. When signed in, click on 'My profile' and fill in the form with name, affiliation, interests, university webpage and university email address (remember to validate the address - you'll receive an email asking you to do so).
    
3. Next you'll find a group of publications written by people with a similar name to yours. You now have to define which publications are yours. You can choose your publications individually or by group.
   
   Note that there may be some types of publications that you don't want to include in your profile (Google indexes content such as newsletters, book reviews etc, not just scholarly articles). If publications are missing, you can add them to your profile manually.
    
4. You now have to choose whether you want publication updates added to your profile automatically, or if you want to to receive an email and review new publications before they are added to your profile.
    
5. You can now choose to make your profile public, and you can add a photo if want to personalize you profile.

If there are publications missing in your Google Scholar profile, mistakes in the individual posts, or if there are publications that should not be included in your profile, you can edit your publication list.
 

This is how you can remove or add publications to your profile:

• If you want to remove publications you choose publications from your list and click on the ’Delete’ button (see picture).
  

• You can add publictions as group, individually, or you can add them manually to your profile (see picture).
  

Compared to citation databases like Web of Science and Scopus data quality in Google Scholar is questionable. Some of the most well known issues with the data quality are as follows:

• Missing publications: Google Scholar only indexes what is visible to its search robots which means that some of your publications might be missing from your profile.
   
• Name problems: Publications from other researchers (with similar names) can find their way to your profile because of name similarity.
   
• Dublicates: Several versions of the same publication are indexed in the database from various sources.
   
• Citation issues:
  • You might find citations that are attached to the wrong publication
  • You might find that citations are counted twice because of dublicates.
  • Not all publications indexed in Google Scholar are research publications. Google Scholar indexes publications based on a broad definition of scholarly output. As a consequence citations to your publications can derive from non-research publications like student handbooks or library guides.
     
• Lack of transparency and documentation
  • Google Scholar is not a transparent database where documentation to how and what is indexed is available. 
  • Citation gaming: Lack of transparency also means that citation gaming is much more difficult to discover in Google Scholar.

If you have questions about Google Scholar, please write to metrics.lib@cbs.dk.

Even though it is possible to export references from Google Scholar, note that you can only export up to 1000 references from the database. 

Here is how you export from Google Scholar: 

1. Visit Settings (in the drop-down menu to the left - see picture) and select your preferred citation format in the "Bibliography Manager" section (Google Scholar currently supports RefWorks, RefMan, EndNote, and BibTeX).
   
2.  Once you've saved your settings, an import link will be added to each search result. Click on the link for the result you would like to export.

'Metrics' (find it in the drop down menu to the left) gives you a ranking list of a top 100 journal list based on citations.

You can specify your rankings lists by Categories and Subcategories.

To see which publications in a journal  that are cited the most and who cited them, click on the h5-index number. This will give you access to the publications that are cited the most and you can see who cited them. 

• Link to Google Scholars own material about the database.
• Link to "Evaluating Google Scholar" by Anne-Will Herzing. 
• Anne-Will Harzings application "Publish or Perish" makes it possible to clean up some of the data issues in Google Scholar and it helps you with calculating a number of bibliometric citation indicators.