How to figure out "citation connections"?

Show you how to use the Publish or Perish software to find out whether two academics have ever cited each other

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Wed 9 Oct 2024 16:26)

In most data sources you can only search in the title and abstract of publications, even if publications are available in Open Access. Google Scholar, however, searches for keywords in the entire text of a full-text document. Hence, a simple citation search for your own name in the author field and another academic’s name in the Keywords field will quickly list the articles in which you have cited this academic’s work.

The screenshot below shows all 41 publications in which I have cited Rosalie Tung - one of the first academics writing about international staffing, which is also one of my own research topics - sorted chronologically with the earliest citing article first.

You can see I have been referring to her work throughout my career, from my first publication in 1995 to one of my most recent publications in 2023. Hence, asking her to act as a referee for my promotion applications, and later for my Academy of International Business Fellowship was a natural choice.

However, this works the other way around as well: you can find out if the other academic has ever cited you. What better way to find out common interests? The screenshot below shows all articles in which Rosalie Tung has cited me. Note that for both searches the actual number of citations might be underestimated as you may well cite more than one of an academic’s papers in each article.

As this type of search relies on Google Scholar searching the list of references and referencing formats and standards differ by journal, you will need to careful with the initials you included in this search. For names that are not that common, it is unlikely that there are two academics with the same family name in a specific sub-discipline. Hence you will normally get a good result with someone’s last name only. In any case, if you want to use this as a conversation starter, you will need to download the articles in question, so you can easily spot any inaccurate references.

Estimate self-citations

This also a way in which you can estimate an author’s self-citations. Simply include their own name in the Keywords field. However, here the limitation that each citing article is only shown once, even if it is citing the academics a dozen times, limits its usefulness. It is quite natural for academics to cite their prior work in their articles; much of our work is cumulative. Typically, most academics would self-cite one of their own articles in at least half of their work. Where self-citation becomes excessive is if academics cite a wide range of their own articles in each publication, with sometimes tenuous relevance.

Earlier projects in this series

Publish or Perish is a Swiss army knife!

These are just a few of the hundreds of nuggets of quality information that you can find using the free Publish or Perish software. Are you interested in finding out more about how you can use the software to conduct effective author, journal, topic, and affiliation searches?

Do you want to learn how to use it for tenure or promotion applications, conducting literature reviews and meta-analyses, deciding where to submit your paper, preparing for job interviews, writing laudations or obituaries, finding reviewers or keynote speakers, uncovering “citation connections” between scholars, and doing bibliometric research?

To read about all of this and much much more, buy my brand-new guide in my Crafting your career in academia series: Using the Publish or Perish software. At 375 pages it is chock-full of tips and tricks on how to get the most out of the software. I promise you will discover at least a dozen use cases that you had never

Other books in the series

My book series Crafting your career in academia launched in August 2022 with a book on Writing Effective Promotion Applications. The series is a collection of short guides dealing with various aspects of working in academia. It is based on my popular blog.

Aug 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Nov 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Feb 2023:

Only £5.95...		 May 2023:

Only £5.95...

Copyright © 2024 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Wed 9 Oct 2024 16:26

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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