3.3.1 Results that differ from Google Scholar

If the Publish or Perish results differ from the ones you get by using Google Scholar directly, this is typically caused by the fact that Publish or Perish uses the Advanced Scholar Search capabilities of Google Scholar, whereas your manual search probably used the standard Google Scholar search.

The latter is equivalent to an All of the words search, which matches the search terms anywhere in the searched documents (author, title, source, abstract, references etc.) and usually provides far too many irrelevant results for an effective citation analysis.

If you would for instance search for my family name using the standard Google Scholar search (i.e. all of the words) rather than the author search, you would get nearly 8,000 citations. This search matches “harzing” anywhere in the document, including all articles citing my work that appear full-text in Google Scholar.

However, if you do want to get the same results in Publish or Perish as with a standard Google Scholar search, do the following.

1. Go to the General citation search page.
2. Empty all text fields except All of the words.
3. Enter your query terms in the All of the words field.
4. Set the Year of publication fields both to 0.
5. Make sure that all subject area boxes are checked.
6. Clear the Title words only field.
7. Click on Lookup.
8. When the results appear, click on the Rank column header to sort the results in the order in which Google Scholar returned them.