RILAS Masterguide

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.

Google Scholar do not make the metadata or the API for their product accessible to other entities, limiting the possibility of seamlessly harvesting the data and integrating it with other products into one dashboard.

Google Scholar Citations lets authors set up a profile page that lists their publications and citation metrics.

The citation metrics are updated automatically, and you can choose to have your list of publications updated automatically or update them yourself.

You can make your profile public, so that it appears in Google Scholar results when people search for your name.

You can sign up for a Google Scholar Citations profile:

1. Sign in to your Google account, or create one if you do not have one.
2. Go to Google Scholar and click on the My Citations link.
3. Follow the prompts to set up your profile and add your publications.
4. Review and complete your profile: for example, upload a photo and double check the list of articles.
5. Ensure you make your profile public if you want other people to be able to view it.
6. Visit your email inbox and click on the verification link.

For more detailed instructions see:

Google Scholar is a useful tracking tool for works or research outputs, not usually covered extensively by Web of Science of Scopus – some books, book chapters, conference papers, journal articles where the source title (journal title) is not indexed in Web of Science or Scopus.

• Citations from all the various kinds of resources (scholarly reviewed or not) are included. Manual checking of the source types is required.
• There are likely duplicate entries for the same article in the times cited count that may need to deduplicated to get an accurate citation count.
• The citation analysis features of Google Scholar are limited compared with that of Web of Science and Scopus.
• To reduce unwanted results, it is necessary to use either power searching or Google Scholar Advanced search
• Google Scholar generally reflects the state of the current visible (to their web crawlers) web. If authors feel that some of the citations to their research outputs are missing, that could be because the citing works are not accessible to the google web crawlers or formatted in a way that makes it difficult to identify bibliographic data.
  • The only way to fix such issues is to work with the publishers of those articles attempting to fix the issues. It may take several months before a fix can be implemented.

Read further

Harzing, A.-W. (2017, October 1). Is Google Scholar flawless? Of course not! [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://harzing.com/blog/2017/10/is-google-scholar-flawless-of-course-not