Finding that elusive article through a title search

Shows you how to use the Publish or Perish software to find a specific article if you only recall a few title words

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Tue 25 Nov 2025 11:22)

Did you know that the Publish or Perish Title words search is also very effective if you want to find a specific article. Does this scenario sound familiar? In a conversation you had at a conference on evaluating academic publication records, someone mentioned a recent article that you should really read. Unfortunately, you forgot both the author and the journal the paper was published in.

All you remember is some words in the title: Google Scholar and h-index. Of course, you could search for the article in Google, but this is likely to provide you with many false hits. Using a Google Scholar search in Publish or Perish can, within seconds, provide you with a list of the likely candidates. The above screenshot shows the twenty most highly cited results for this search which resulted in nearly 100 hits.

Although it was the most-cited article by Bar-Ilan you were interested in, you now also have a list of related articles that might also be of interest to you. Moreover, by sorting the results by year, you can also review recently published papers about the topic. The highly cited, and often early papers, on the topic focused on comparisons between data sources and a general application of the h-index. More recent papers tended to look at increasingly specialised applications of the h-index as well as potential for manipulation.

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...

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Copyright © 2025 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Tue 25 Nov 2025 11:22

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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