How much is [author x] cited in [journal y]?

Shows you how to use the Publish or Perish software to find out how much a particular author is cited in a particular journal

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Sat 19 Oct 2024 11:01)

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 to find out how much a particular author is cited in a particular journal, just enter the journal in the Publication Name field and the author in the Keywords field. This gives you an idea which conversations you are part of; it might thus be useful if you are submitting to the journal in question. It may also be useful for editors looking for reviewers or editorial board members.

The screenshot above shows the first 26 of 192 articles published in Journal of International Business Studies (the top journal in my field) citing one or more of my publications. Not surprisingly, the first time my work was cited in JIBS was in my own article in the journal in 2000. Self-citations are likely to occur before other citations.

However, an analysis like this also allows you to verify whether the number of citing articles increases over time by sorting the articles by years as above. To quickly count citations in specific years or range of year, un-select all publications and then select the years you want to count. In my case, citations to my work did increase over the years: from 13 in 2001-2005 to 37 in 2006-2010, 50 in 2011-2015, and 56 in 2016-2020.

So, on average my work was cited in respectively 2, 7, 10 and 11 articles in the Journal of International Business Studies a year in the last 20 years. Given that JIBS only publishes between 60 and 90 articles a year, this shows my work has a significant impact on the field, being cited in 10-15% of the articles published in the journal from 2006 onwards. Citations in 2021-2023 show that in the three most recent full years citations to my work had stabilised at 11-13 per year.

Knowing whether your work is cited in your field’s top journal, whether it continues to be cited over the years, and what conversations in the field it is contributing to is useful not just for your journal submissions or editors looking for reviewers, but also for your tenure and promotion applications. You can find much more guidance on this in my book Writing effective promotion applications.

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 even thought about before!

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 Sat 19 Oct 2024 11:01

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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