Using Publish or Perish as Research Dean or Research Manager - Evaluating author output by affiliation

Shows you how to use the Publish or Perish software to find out what a particular author has published while affiliated with a particular university

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Sat 19 Oct 2024 14:40)

In your role as Research Dean or Research Manager, you might need to establish what a particular author has published during the time they were affiliated with a particular university. Publish or Perish was an essential tool in my role as Associate Dean Research at Melbourne University.

It allowed us to quickly get a full record of an individual academic’s publications for our yearly submission to the government, particularly for academics who consistently ignored our emails. It might also be useful to assess which of an author’s publications will be included in international research rankings such as the Times Higher Education, QS, US News or ARWU/Shanghai ranking.

What data-source to use?

In doing these searches, you will need to strike a balance between accuracy and coverage. Of the currently available data sources in Publish or Perish Crossref only provides very partial results for affiliation searches and is not recommended. Google Scholar appears to be unable to parse affiliations on most articles in Elsevier journals. The API for OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar do not currently offer the option of running complex combined searches. PubMed is only relevant for biomedical researchers.

Traditional bibliometric data sources such as the Web of Science and Scopus have a dedicated affiliation field and will thus get you a fully accurate list of publications. However, they may miss some publications that are in outlets that are not included in their coverage. Google Scholar doesn’t have an affiliation search. Hence, its results might not be fully accurate and complete, but are likely to be more complete.

The best strategy would therefore simply be to triangulate and use different data sources. Each data source has its own limitations, but PoP allows you to run searches in different data sources very easily. It will even pre-populate your new search with the current search terms. Note, however, that every data source has its own specific search syntax, so you may need to adapt these slightly. The next section shows a detailed example for the discipline of Business & Management.

Triangulating: Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar

Here I searched for my own publications between 2016 and 2018 with a Middlesex University affiliation in three different data sources:  Scopus, Web of Science (WoS) and Google Scholar. Although there is a common core of publications covered in each of the data bases there are also important differences.

With fifteen journal articles Scopus (see above) provides the fewest results for this search, but it doesn’t miss any of my journal articles published between 2016 and 2018. Unfortunately, the free Scopus version used in PoP only shows the first author and is also limited to 200 results. 

A WoS search reports nearly all the journal articles that Scopus does, but misses my 2016 article in the Journal of Management Education, which appears to be covered only until 2014 in WoS. Web of Science does, however, cover all five substantive chapters in my co-authored 2018 book as well as its preface, introduction, and conclusion. Web of Science has substantially increased its coverage of books in recent years, although this hasn’t resulted in a back catalogue of books yet.

As shown in the image above, Google Scholar covers most articles that Scopus does, but misses two articles in Journal of World Business and one in Journal of Informetrics. Both are published by Elsevier, whereas the other articles in my list are all published by other publishers. As these Elsevier publications are found with a regular Google Scholar search for my name (i.e., without the affiliation restriction) it appears Google Scholar has difficulty parsing the author affiliation data in Elsevier. For one of these articles [From dilemmatic struggle...] a stray citation was found (see: Google Scholar - include/exclude stray citations and patents). 

Like WoS, Google Scholar does cover the five substantive chapters and the conclusion in my 2018 co-authored book, as well as the book as a whole, though it misses the Preface and Introduction. That said, Google Scholar does report significant citation levels for the book, 47 citations in all, 29 to the full book and 18 to its chapters whereas WoS only picks up two citations. Google Scholar also covers three white papers (From h-index to hIa, Sacrifice a little coverage…, The mystery of the phantom reference, and Running the REF on a rainy Sunday afternoon), and two blogposts on the Impact of Social Science Blog on internal vs external promotion.

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 14:40

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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