PoP 8 new features (9): Google Scholar - retrieval of citing works

Week 9 of a weekly announcement of new features of Publish or Perish version 8

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Sat 17 Sep 2022 09:49)

On the 1st of November 2021, nearly exactly 15 years after first launching Publish or Perish, we released version 8 of the software. After two months of "soft launch", we are now ready to publicise its new features. To do so, I will post about a new feature every Thursday. If you want a complete overview have a look at this blogpost: Publish or Perish version 8.

You can retrieve citing works of any publication in Publish or Perish by right-clicking on it and selecting the relevant option. You can do this for a single publication, for all results of a query (this might take a long time as it puts a heavy load on Google Scholar), or for a sub-set of the results (see next section).

Retrieve citing works for a sub-set of the results

If you would like to retrieve citing works for a sub-set of the results, simply select the relevant results and right-click. This may be useful if you would like to establish the citing works for a particular research topic. For instance, I have written nine articles that relate to international mail surveys, focusing on their challenges, response rates, response styles and language effects.

To retrieve all publications citing these articles I first need to select only these nine articles. There are two ways to do this. The easiest way is to first uncheck all results (right-click anywhere in the results panel and select uncheck all) and then simply check only the publications you are interest in. The screenshot below shows the set of results.

Another way to do this would be to select each of the nine articles without first unchecking all results. This might be a quicker way if you are only interested in a few articles. The screenshot below shows what this would look like.

Once you have selected the relevant articles, right-click and click Retrieve Citing Works in Publish or Perish. PoP then retrieve all publications citing one or more of the articles in this set. Publish or Perish automatically de-duplicates citing publications. So if a particular publication cites more than one publication in you set, it will only be shown once.

The screenshot above shows the most highly cited citing works of the relevant set of publications. Once you have retrieved all cited works you can export them in any format for further analysis if so desired.

What if there are more than 1,000 results?

Google Scholar never provides more than 1,000 results. This can create a problem if you want a complete set of citing works for highly cited publications. We therefore added year ranges to retrieve citing works in Publish or Perish. To use this feature, you will need to cancel the search after it has started and include the year ranges at that stage. 

This allows you to “partition” your search when there are more than 1,000 citing works. This is very useful if you are doing an analysis of all works citing a seminal contribution in a particular field. Simply copy the search as many times as you need and adapt the year ranges. After that you can aggregate these results again to a single record in Publish or Perish. For details on how to do this see the tutorial page on aggregation.

Obviously, you can also use this if you are interested only in citations in a specific year or for instance citations in the last 3 or 5 years. The screenshot below shows the results for a citing works search for the seven articles I published in the Journal of International Business Studies. I limited the search to citations from 2016 onwards to retrieve only recent citations. The screenshot below shows the first seven of some 1,100 citing works. For more detail see: Support Publish or Perish.

Download Publish or Perish version 8

You can download the latest version of Publish or Perish from the following pages:

Related blogposts

Support Publish or Perish

Development of the Publish or Perish software is a volunteering effort that has been ongoing since 2006, regularly adding new features and data sources and expanding use cases and geographical distribution.

To keep Publish or Perish free (gratis) for everyone, your contribution toward our costs of hosting, bandwidth, and software development is appreciated. If you find Publish or Perish useful, then this is your chance to say "thank you" to the developers.

You can support us by buying the Publish or Perish guide or tutorial and/or through a donation. Only one user out of every five thousand contributes (that is, only 0.02% of all users!), so any support is very welcome indeed.

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Copyright © 2022 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Sat 17 Sep 2022 09:49

Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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