Publish or Perish: Realising Google Scholar's potential to democratise citation analysis

Reports on a presentation at the Google Scholar Day: Changing current evaluation paradigms

On the 20th of February I was due to present at the Google Scholar day organised by Isidro Aguillo's Cybermetrics lab in Madrid.

  • Harzing, A.W. (2017) Publish or Perish: Realising Google Scholar's potential to democratise citation analysis, presented at the Google Scholar day, Madrid, 20 February 2017. Available online...

Unfortunately, easyJet managed to sabotage these plans by cancelling the flight to Madrid after a wait of several hours, so I had to present virtually through Google Hangouts instead. Sadly, this also meant I didn't have an opportunity to meet up with my co-authors from the EC3 group and of course I had to miss the Spanish cuisine and sun! It was also a bit challenging as I couldn't see the audience or the slides and I couldn't even hear the Spanish side. Still... we managed, sort of.

For those of you who are interested in my presentation, you can find it here. I discussed five key topics:

  1. Brief historical overview of “citizen bibliometrics”, i.e. use of bibliometrics by non-experts
  2. How Publish or Perish and Google Scholar have democratised citation analysis
  3. Publish or Perish users: who are they and how do they use PoP?
  4. Publish or Perish version 5: key new features
  5. What’s next for citizen bibliometrics?

Want to read more about any of this?

In my presentation I referred to several of my academic papers, discussed in these blogposts:

Health warning: Might contain multiple personalities
Shows how a lack of name disambiguation leads to serious distortion of the Essential Science Indicators

Is ISI misunderstanding the Social Sciences?
Documents how ISI is inappropriately applying Science-based criteria to articles in the Social Sciences

Do Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science speak your language?
Short summary of white paper on the coverage of non-English language publications in three major databases for citation analysis

Proof over promise: a more inclusive ranking of academics
Shows how using a different data source and different metrics completely changes the Dutch Economics top-40

Microsoft Academic (Search): a Phoenix arisen from the ashes?
Assesses Microsoft Academic coverage through a detailed comparison with Google Scholar, the Web of Science, and Scopus

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Support Publish or Perish

The development of the Publish or Perish software is a volunteering effort that has been ongoing since 2006. Publish or Perish was designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact and tenure and promotion to its best advantage, even if you have very few citations.

You can also use it to decide which journals to submit to, to prepare for a job interview, to do a literature review, to do bibliometric research, to write laudatios or obituaries, or to do some homework before meeting your academic hero. Publish or Perish is a real Swiss army knife.

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