1.5.2 Part 2: Day-to-day uses of Publish or Perish citation analysis

In Part 2, I present the most common day-to-day uses of the Publish or Perish software. Chapter 7 provides tips and tricks for academics that need to make their case for tenure or promotion. I discuss the importance of reference groups as well as several ways to show your citation record to its best advantage.

In Chapter 8, I discuss how to evaluate other academics. The examples in this chapter vary from a 5-minute preparation before meeting someone you dont know, to evaluating editorial board members or prospective PhD supervisors, from writing up tributes (or laudations) and eulogies to deciding on publication awards and preparing for a job interview.

Chapter 9 turns the tables and looks at citation analysis for Deans and other academic administrators. It includes four topics: the need to accept Google Scholar as an alternative data source, the myths about self-citation, the inappropriateness of citation analysis at early career stages, and the differences in citation impact across disciplines.

In Chapter 10, I show how Publish or Perish can be used to assist you when you are uncertain which journal to submit it to. It can be used to get ideas of the types of journals that publish articles on the topic you are writing on and to compare a set of journals in terms of their citation impact. Finally, once you have decided on the target journal, it can also help you to double-check that you havent missed any prior work from the journal in question.

Chapter 11 shows you how Publish or Perish can be used to do a quick literature review to identify the most cited articles and/or scholars in a particular field. It can also be employed to identify whether any research has been done in a particular area at all (useful for grant applications). Other applications are to evaluate the development of the literature in a particular topic over time.

Finally, Chapter 12 discusses how to use Publish or Perish when doing bibliometric research. Bibliometric research refers to the quantitative analysis of bodies of literature and their references: citations. These bodies of literature can be grouped in many different ways, but in this chapter, I will focus on the grouping by author or journal and discuss some tips and tricks in doing bibliometric research on authors and journals.