4.3.1 Results that differ from Google Scholar

If the Publish or Perish results differ from the ones you get by using Google Scholar directly, this is typically caused by the fact that Publish or Perish uses the Advanced Scholar Search capabilities of Google Scholar, whereas your manual search probably used the standard Google Scholar search.

The latter is equivalent to an All of the words search, which matches the search terms anywhere in the searched documents (author, title, source, abstract, references etc.) and usually provides too many irrelevant results for an effective citation analysis.

If you would for instance search for Journal of International Business Studies using the standard Google Scholar search (i.e. all of the words) rather than the journal search, many of your highly cited results would not refer to this journal (see screenshot). This search matches “Journal of International Business Studies” anywhere in the document, including articles published in other journals that cite articles in Journal of International Business Studies.

Search results

As a result you will get many highly cited articles referring to articles in Journal of International Business Studies, rather than published in Journal of International Business Studies. This is also illustrated by the difference in citation rank and Google Scholar rank. These articles are highly cited (hence highly ranked on citations), but not very relevant to the search (hence low-ranked on the Google Scholar rank).

However, if you do want to get the same results in Publish or Perish as with a standard Google Scholar search, do the following.

  1. Go to the General citation search page.
  2. Empty all text fields except All of the words.
  3. Enter your query terms in the All of the words field.
  4. Set the Year of publication fields both to 0.
  5. Make sure that all subject area boxes are checked.
  6. Clear the Title words only field.
  7. Click on Lookup.
  8. When the results appear, click on the Rank column header to sort the results in the order in which Google Scholar returned them.