3.3.6 Duplicate results
For most authors you will notice duplicate or near-duplicate articles in the Results list. These duplicates may be due to one or more of the following:
- Sloppy referencing. Not all references to an author's work are perfectly accurate and small differences in the names of the authors, the article's title, or its sources may cause the same article to appear more than once.
- Other funnies. Google Scholar occasionally appears to return duplicate citations or just different results for the same query. This seems to happen particularly when the name you are looking for appears both as a given name and a surname in the returned results, for example Martin, Neal, Tania. If this happens, a second Lookup (with the same parameters) may return more accurate results.
The effect on the citation analysis is that:
- The total number of articles may come out higher than the actual number, because duplicates are counted separately.
- The citations per paper may come out lower, for the same reason.
- The h-index and g-index may come out differently, because citations are spread over the duplicates.
Since Version 3.0 of Publish or Perish, duplicates can be merged into the master record, simply by dragging the stray citation onto the master record. An example of a merged record is shown in the screenshot below. See Section 2.1.3 for further details on how to do this.
