2006-2026 - The changing usage of Publish or Perish over the years: where, why, when, what, who and how?

Celebrating 20 years of the Publish or Perish citation analysis software with an analysis of its usage over the years.

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Sat 30 May 2026 14:30)

This year the Publish or Perish software is celebrating its 20th anniversary. So, I thought it would be nice to look back to where, why, when, by whom and how it has been used over the years, and what they would have used if PoP hadn't been around. So, please join me on a journey through the decades. If you want to skip to a particular section, just use the Tables of Contents below.

Table of contents

Introduction: PoP’s USPs and data sources

Where? From Anglo/Western to world-wide

Why? From h-index calculator to lit reviews

When? Increasingly frequently...

What alternatives? Free services dominate

Who? From profs to students

How? Press, reviews, research & feedback

Final reflections

Want to know more about PoP?

Help us to keep Publish or Perish free

Introduction: PoP’s USPs and data sources

Both the academic environment and the Publish or Perish software have experienced quite a bit of change over the past two decades. However, the PoP features that users like most have remained quite stable over the years. Here is a word-cloud from the user survey I have been running since 2015 (please complete it if you haven't yet!).

In addition to the ability to both search for, and export, information/data on authors, articles, papers, publications, journals, citations, metrics and in particular the h-index, PoP's most important selling point is its ease of use and using it is so quick/fast. One of the key reasons why I like PoP myself is that I can avoid using the web interfaces of other services. They are often confusing and frequently load so slowly that I give up after only a few searches.

A growing number of academics and students seem to agree: over the years PoP usage has increased to around two million individuals. It first peaked in 2012, just before Google launched its Google Scholar Citation Profiles. Over the next five years its usage declined slowly by about 30%, but then it started growing again, picking up pace in 2019 and reaching a record new usage in 2025.

Over the years, the data sources supported by Publish or Perish have expanded from Google Scholar to include Microsoft Academic (2016) Google Scholar Citation Profiles, Crossref, Scopus, and the Web of Science (all in 2017), PubMed (2020) to assist scholars working on COVID-19 related research, and most recently Semantic Scholar (2021), Open Alex (2022) and Lens (2024). For more information about most of these data sources refer to the Publish or Perish manual, this YouTube video and my latest guide: Using the Publish or Perish software.

Where? From Anglo/Western to world-wide

I don't have systematic data on where PoP was used in the first ten years. However, my web analytics service does allow me to compare visits to my website - two thirds of which are directly or indirectly related to Publish or Perish – at five-year intervals since 2016.

In each of these years my website drew visitors from more than 200 different countries and territories. In 2016, the most exotic countries on the list were Vatican City and Palau, in 2021 they included Greenland an Antarctica 2026, whereas 2026 featured the Faroe Islands and the Turks & Caicos Islands. However, the majority of the visitors came from the top-20 countries represented below (2016: 75%, 2021: 68%, 2026: 66%)

Note that the top-20 for 2026 excludes Indonesia; visitors to my website from this country increased dramatically in 2021. When still included in my website’s analytics, it made up 80-90% of the visitors to my website on its own. Beyond academics, most university students in Indonesia, and even some high-school students now appear to be using the software. There are dozens of video tutorials in Indonesian, one of which has more than a million views and more than 1,000 comments. Unfortunately, late 2021 I had to exclude Indonesia from my website analytics service to avoid having to substantially upgrade my contract.

2016: Anglo/Western usage is in the majority

Many of the same countries are represented in the top-20 in all three periods; 16 countries appear in the top-20 in all three periods. Countries debuting in the top-20 in 2021 or 2026 are Ghana, Mexico, Singapore, and South Africa. However, despite the stability of countries in the top-20, the dominance of Anglophone countries and European countries has decreased quite significantly.

In 2016 more than 35% of the visitors in the top-20 came from the USA, Australia, the UK or Canada; in 2021 this had dropped to 25%, dropping further to less than 20% in 2026. In 2016, 22% of the visitors came from continental European countries, whereas in 2021 this had shrunk to nearly 16%, declining further to around 12% in 2026. Note that this doesn’t mean that usage from these countries has declined in absolute numbers; most of these countries continued to show a modest increase over the years. It is just that most of the overall growth in the software’s usage in past decade has come from non-Western countries.

2021: Increasing use in non-Western countries

In 2016 India was the only non-Western country that was significantly represented, it had nearly 5% of total visitors. Brazil, China, Malaysia, Iran, Colombia, the Philippines, Russia and Turkey were all represented in much smaller numbers between 2.4% and 1.2% of total visitors.

In 2021, no less than three non-Western countries featured in the top-6: Indonesia, India, and Brazil; combined they represented more than a fifth of the total number of visitors. With Turkey, Malaysia, Colombia, China, South Africa, the Philippines and Mexico, non-Western countries in the top-20 now make up half of the countries and nearly half of usage in the top-20.

2026: Non-Western countries make up 60% of the top-20

In 2026, this pattern intensified. Even excluding Indonesia, there are now three non-Western countries in the top-4: the Philippines, India, and Brazil. Malaysia, Colombia and Ghana also made it to the top-10 this year. There are thus more non-Western than Western countries in the top-10 and top-20. Moreover, 60% of usage in the top-20 is now in non-Western countries. PoP clearly fulfils a strong need in these countries as is evidenced by this user response.

I live in a very poor country [Venezuela]. It not possible for me to pay WOS or any other bibliographic service. In that sense, PoP has been a huge help and relief. I really thank you for this extraordinary program. You are making our academic lives in economically depressed countries much easier.

Why? From h-index calculator to literature reviews

Since 2015 I have been running a PoP user survey. To date well over 18,000 users have completed at least part of the survey (please do so here if you haven't yet). So, in the remainder of this white paper, I will compare survey responses at three discrete points in time – 2015, 2020, and 2025.

As users typically complete this survey only once, these three time points do not compare identical cohorts over time. They thus reflect both changing use and changing users. The 2015 cohort included anyone who had used the software since 2006, the later cohorts included an increasingly high number of novice users. Also note that unlike the data based on web analytics the survey does include Indonesia – in 2025 more than half of the responses come from this country – but the trends described below are universal.

One question in the survey asks users how long they have been using the software. As can be seen below, in 2015 three quarters of the respondents indicated that they had been using the software for either 3-5 years or 6-10 year. Hence, the 2015 responses also give us a good picture of pre-2015 usage, whereas for 2020 and especially for 2025 most of the survey respondents are new users. In 2025, 43% have used the software for less than three months and another 21% for less than a year; only 17% have used it for more than 3 years. So, responses in 2020 and especially 2025 do not represent the entire cohort of PoP users.

2015 usage – primarily a h-index calculator

As is evident below, PoP started out as a h-index calculator. In 2015 nearly 90% of respondents were using it to check their own h-index or citations. Given that the first version of PoP launched only a year after the h-index had been introduced, this was not entirely surprising. It was also used to look up other academics, either out of curiosity (by nearly 2/3 of the PoP users), or to formally evaluate them for promotion, tenure, job or funding applications (by more than half of the PoP users).

In addition, however, PoP was also used quite frequently to evaluate journals (28% of the respondents), do literature reviews (25%) or simply to find the most cited papers in a particular field (23%). More specialised use cases were used by a smaller number of respondents: bibliometric research (21%), tenure and promotion applications (18%), and deciding where to submit papers (13%).

2020 usage – increasing variation in use cases

For those responding the survey in 2020, looking up one's own h-index or citation record or looking up other academics remained popular with both use cases reaching nearly 50%. However, usage for the evaluation of other academics halved. This was matched by a decline in using the software to make your case for tenure or promotion.

Usage for journal evaluation, either more generally or in deciding where to submit papers remained largely stable. However, usage for research purposes, whether for literature reviews (from 25% to 55%), to find the most cited papers (from 22% to 35%) or for bibliometric research (from 21% to 39%) had increased quite dramatically between 2015 and 2020.

As such, usage of the software is now more varied than it was in the past when it was mostly a tool to calculate the h-index, or other citation metrics for oneself or others. In 2020 five separate use cases (two evaluating academics and three evaluating papers) score above 40% or are approaching this level.

2025 usage – evaluation of papers rather than people

The 2020 trends intensified in 2025 and – for new users at least – PoP usage has shifted away from evaluating academics. Less than a quarter of the survey respondents is now using the software to check their own h-index. Looking up other academics is now a more frequent use than looking up your own record. Given that many of our new users are now students (see: Who? From Profs to students), this is not surprising.

The software’s usage for formal evaluation of other academics and promotion applications likewise remained low. However, it is important to realise that – even more so than in 2020 – survey respondents in 2025 were largely to new users. Hence, there is likely to be considerable “heritage” use in these two categories.

On the other hand, whilst for new users the use of Publish or Perish to evaluate people has declined, its usage in evaluating papers in some form or other has increased. This is most notable for literature reviews, which – with two thirds of new users using PoP for this purpose, it is now the most common use case for the software. However, about a third of the new PoP users also use it for bibliometric research, to evaluate journals, or to find the most cited papers in a field.

Facilitating the evaluation of papers

In the past ten years, we have further facilitated this type of usage by introducing nine new data sources, adding the option to export full abstracts in 2020, creating a more flexible keyword search, and making it easier to replicate searches across data sources by pre-filling the query form with identical search terms. I can't think of a better way to summarise the advantages of using PoP than these two recent user survey responses.

Searching for publications through internet portals is a pain as they are typically quite slow, all have different interfaces that aren't particularly intuitive and don't help at all to keep track of the searches you have already done. PoP solves all the issues above; it is both easier and faster to use than web portal alternatives. With PoP I feel much more confident that I can perform a systematic review of available literature on a topic. I also really like how the results from a search are displayed; it is easy to rank them and/or filter them by a wide variety of criteria, and this is really helpful.

My current research project included 44 unique keyword & author searches with 14 citing work retrievals. I did a similar project last year using only Google Scholar and an EBSCO search interface; it took me several weeks to get to the same point. Using PoP cut the time by 60-80% and I have the search results stored - I can look back over the results history. PoP is extremely powerful for this kind of research project.

When? Increasingly frequently...

Changing usage also seems to have led users to use PoP more frequently. You normally don't look up your own h-index or citations every day, although some users do confide that they find PoP addictive and check their citation counts several times a week. However, if literature reviews are your key reason for using PoP, you are likely to use it quite often.

The proportion of survey respondents using the software either daily or several times a week has increased from just over a third in 2015 to more than 40% in 2020 and nearly 60% in 2025. That said, in each time of the three time periods, the most common answer was “a couple of times per week”. So, it is clear that frequent use of the software has been prominent throughout its lifetime.

What alternatives? Free services dominate

Although a few years ago have opened up the possibility to provide donations to help us cover the cost of the software, Publish or Perish has always been free. Many survey respondents let us know in the open answer questions how much they appreciate this. It is therefore not surprising that, in all three time periods, the most frequently used alternative service is the free Google Scholar.

In 2015, this included heavy usage of the – then recently introduced – Google Scholar Profiles, but the declining emphasis on evaluating people meant this alternative was chosen by less than 40% of new users in the other time periods.

Reflecting the increasing usage of the software in less well-resourced countries and universities, the difference between seeing Google Scholar and the Web of Science as a viable alternative has increased from around 15% in 2015 to more than 40% in 2025.

However, none of the other free resources are very suitable for literature reviews or bibliometric research. So, it is not surprising that the proportion of survey users saying PoP is the only service that suits their needs has nearly tripled over the last ten years. Nearly 30% of the respondents now choose this option.

In addition, the open answer option includes many pleas to keep PoP forever. Here are some of the most funny and heartwarming answers to the question: If Publish or Perish was no longer available, what other services would you use?

Beverage serving services to drown my sorrow, really happy for this program.

For me after use PorP I don't want to use anyother.

I have no idea. Then I have to find replacement. So, do not punish me. PP is perfect for my needs.

I would cry.

If publish and perish was no longer available it would be a great loss to the scientific community, it has taught researchers to evaluate publication worth alongside volume.

It will be catastrophic! please don't do that.

Need Publish or Perish because it is more user friendly and easy to use.

None, you are unique and very important.

Oh no please.

Please do not leave us without this tool, there is nothing like it ever.

Please do not stop Publish or Perish. If need be, I can pay from my own pocket to be able to use this tool.

Using google scholar without PoP is painful, so I would probably end up having to write something in R or python to scrape and it would never be the same!!

What? There's software which can replace POP???

Wha- why would you do that to us???

Who? From profs to students (PhD, MA, UG, high school)

Publish or Perish was first developed in 2006 to help me make my own case for citation impact after a failed application for promotion to full Professor at the University of Melbourne (see also My academic career: a story in four seasons, eight failures, and four morals).

2015 users – professors all around

In the early days, most Publish or Perish users seem to have been academics similar to me, i.e. those in traditional research career trajectories. More than a third of the users in 2015 were full professors, with another third either Associate or Assistant Professor and a further 10% Research Fellow or Postdoc.

Student usage was fairly limited. At less than 5% of the survey respondents, the proportion of students using the software was tiny. In fact, there were more retired academics using the software than all students combined. Usage by librarians, research administrators, consultants and government officials was similarly limited.

2020 users – increasing variety in user groups

The 2020 survey responses, however, showed that PoP users had diversified significantly. The largest group of users are now PhD students, with more than one in five in this category. Although, with nearly 20%, full professors are still a large group of users, all professorial categories declined in importance. Less than 40% of the 2020 respondents have a regular assistant, associate or full professorial job, compared with 65% in 2015. The proportion of research fellows, postdocs and retired academics also declined slightly.

The biggest increase came from students. Combined, students now make up well over a third of the users, an eight-fold increase since 2015. The proportion of smaller use groups such as librarians, consultants and government officials also increased. The "other" category (not shown) also evidenced increasingly diversified use not just by independent, freelance and unemployed researchers, but also by medical practitioners, industry researchers, publishers, and NGOs.

2025 users – students dominate the scene

As was the case for “why the software is used”, the trends visible in 2020 only intensified in 2025. The dominant user groups are now UG or Masters students; the software has even found its way to high school students. Nearly 60% of those responding to the survey in 2025 were students. Part of this is the “Indonesia effect”, half of the responses in 2025 came from Indonesia, but the effect is still present for the other half of the 2025 cohort too.

Proportionally, usage in all of the other groups – both regular academics (postdocs, research fellows, assistant, associate, full, and retired professors) and specific groups such as government officials, research administrators, and consultants – has declined. That said, given that overall usage is substantially higher in 2025 than it was in 2020 and that survey respondents are generally new users, there is likely to still be a substantial group of “legacy users”, i.e. traditional research and teaching academics.

How? Press, reviews, research & feedback

Finally, beyond the general reasons for “why the software is used”, its press coverage, reviews for the PoP book, its usage in academic research, and user feedback for the PoP software gives us a better idea of how exactly it is used and how it was received.

News coverage for Publish or Perish

Publish or Perish has received very frequent news coverage. A very small selection of both recent and older publications is below. [Unfortunately, some of these links are now dead. I just wish the press did a better job in maintaining their websites].

Anne-Wil Harzing's Publish-or-Perish is a great asset that gives you a quick snapshot of any scholar you want to research. Indeed, I was doing a teleconference with the president of one of the major European universities last week and while we were talking, he was using this program to scan my work and its citations; I was doing the same with his work!

Professor Dunleavy is an advocate of a system developed by University of Melbourne academic Anne-Wil Harzing that he said was used extensively by universities in Europe and Britain.

University of NSW marketing professor Ian Wilkinson, who feared the Australasian journal for his field might not survive a Thomson-dominated RQF, is an admirer of Publish or Perish and has urged the Government to look at it.

Reviews for the Publish or Perish Book

  • Impact of Social Sciences blog "Harzing's book is an excellent introduction to the complex world of article level citation data. I would highly recommend it for any researcher who wishes to understand this growing field, and it is full of practical advice."
  • Nature, the international weekly journal of science (Dec 2010): “The Publish or Perish Book is a useful resource for scientists, particularly in fields in which Google Scholar is a major source of citations.”
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (April 2011): "Harzing’s book is a useful, thoughtfully written, and highly informative source on a particular implementation of citation analysis .."
  • Scientometrics (April 2011): "Harzing has certainly created a tool which can be used to blast paths through the evaluative defenses surrounding the entrenched positions of academia."

Publish or Perish usage in research

Ironically, Publish or Perish has now become my second most cited “publication”, with nearly 2500 official citations in Google Scholar. Additionally, nearly 10,000 academics have used it in their academic articles without referencing it in the list of references. The graph below shows how this usage increased of the years. The potential of the software for research purposes was grasped quickly. In the year after its launch in October 2006, seventy articles were already referring to it.

After a steady rise for the next five years, it plateaued between 2012 and 2018. Since 2019 however, its usage in academic articles kept rising, with a particularly fast rise since 2021. It is likely that this rise is caused by the increasing use of desk-research – either literature reviews or bibliometric research – in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic. In recent years usage appears to have plateaued again, possibly because the introduction of Generative AI, which unfortunately has displaced quite a few services.

User feedback for Publish or Perish

The software is used and praised all over the world, from individual academics and librarians to governments departments (e.g. US Dept of Energy, US Dept of Veteran Affairs, US Environmental Protection Agency, US Agency for International Development), from grant giving agencies (e.g. SSHRC in Canada, CNRS in France) to research laboratories (e.g. Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, IBM). Here is a small selection of the many thank-you messages and expressions of support that we have received over the past 20 years.

The more I work with GS the more I appreciate the gate those guys opened for us. PoP enhances GS and if I were working for Google, I would consider developing it further to become the equivalent of Google Earth.

I wanted to thank you for creating Publish or Perish and for your book. This has been absolutely instrumental in making my case for promotion to Full Professor. Your work has allowed me to regain my grasp of this process. I am very appreciative that you have provided this irreplaceable information free of charge. I know that I am not the only woman who has been discouraged in her academic aspirations who has benefited from your work.

Prior to integrating Publish or Perish into our workflow, my colleagues and I struggled to compare the results of our Google Scholar searches to results found in other databases (such as PubMed or EMBASE). We now utilize Publish or Perish to export results from Google Scholar to our citation management tool, allowing us to deduplicate and screen results much more quickly. We are grateful to have one more tool in our tool belt when conducting evidence reviews.

As I am sure you realize, being able to demonstrate the influence of research by the Worldbank is enormously important to supporting and expanding that research. [...] I have found your software Publish or Perish to be the single most useful tool available for these purposes.

I think a lot of people have been wanting “someone” to do this for a while now. You’re that someone – kudos and thanks to you!

Many thanks for your generosity and congratulations for your work. If we didn't have your program, it would be very complicated to conduct our research, because we are running this project with a shoe-string budget.

I’ve referred people to your software more times than I can count. At least within our circles, it’s recognized as the single most effective tool for calculating personal H-indices. I do not doubt that PoP is in large part responsible for the broadening interest in bibliometrics. Giving academics a tool by which to compare themselves to their peers has had a tremendous impact globally.

I am writing to thank you for offering the Publish or Perish software to the academic community at no charge, and for keeping this excellent product updated. Within our university, individual faculty members use Publish or Perish to track the impact of their work, and we find it indispensable.

A close colleague of mine told me an amusing anecdote last month about a social sciences meeting for upgrading Oxford University academics to professor, at which 17 department heads presented cases for members of their staff - all but one of whom used Harzing (PoP) statistics.

I've lost words to thank you for creating such a powerful tool. I love PoP so much that when there's a newly appointed researcher, I quickly check on PoP and immediately add publications in our institutional repository. PoP harvest data from all platforms even if the work is not cited, that is the strength of this tool. Thanks a million Prof. Harzing.

PoP is a comprehensive tool that identifies research impact and that points to the positioning of the journals where research appears. I can, for example, say that my paper in journal ABC is the Nth highest ranked of all papers in that journal since a specific date. This type of information is invaluable. It not only shows my citation count but my count relative to others who publish in the same journals.

Publish or Perish has become an essential tool for academics around the world. In my job as an editor of a major international journal, I often need to run a quick check on colleagues, for example, wish to be considered for Board membership. PoP is perfect for such purposes.

I recently had to compile an online bibliography of work in [...] for Oxford University Press. POP was incredibly helpful for figuring out what the most cited works and scholars were in the various sub-areas I included. It would certainly have been a less useful contribution to the OUP series without POP.

What a FANTASTIC tool. Thanks for sharing it. I forwarded your msg to my Dean suggesting that your program be used to gather data to be used for promotion decisions (to full professor). This would not be the only indicator of impact/quality, but certainly an important one.

As a former chair of the International Mathematical Union's Committee on Electronic Information and Communication (CEIC) I have found it necessary to be well informed about all matters relating to citation measurement and the use of related metrics. In this setting, Publish or Perish has been a very fine tool to assist with many of the delicate and consequential issues regarding the uses and abuses of citation data.

PoP has become an academic workhorse for both doing research as well as evaluating researchers and journals (I served as the chair of the "fellows selection committee" of my professional society, where it was an important tool). I also routinely use it to find important papers in an area, or the best people working on a topic (for referees).

As a senior academic in a non-traditional field, I've recommended your web site to a number of my colleagues. I'm always looking for non-ISI options to suggest to junior faculty looking to make the case for tenure. Your efforts are appreciated!

Final reflections

With new audiences come new challenges. Publish or Perish needs to meet the needs of 80+ year old retired academics who have spent much of their careers without a computer, 60+ year olds like me who only started to use them after their initial studies and can still remember a working life without email and the Internet, and younger gen-X and millennials who are computer an internet natives.

But it also needs to serve 20–30-year-old students, and now even teenagers, who grew up with smartphones, expect results with little effort and without using the extensive user manual, and don't even understand that Publish or Perish is a software program, not an app, a website, or even GenAI ;-).

So, whenever we introduce new features or support materials, we need to keep all these users in mind and make sure the software works for all of them. We happily do this, but if you do write to us for technical support, please keep this academic etiquette blogpost in mind: Please be polite and considerate and remember that we spend considerable time and money to provide a free service to you.

New book 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. Books are available in all local Amazon stores as Kindle, paperback, and hardcover. They have been rated 4.8-5 stars and have received very positive reviews.

Aug 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Nov 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Feb 2023:

Only £5.95...		 May 2023:

Only £5.95...		 August 2023:

Only £9.99...

Want to know more about Publish or Perish?

Help us to keep Publish or Perish free

The development of the Publish or Perish software is a volunteering effort that has been ongoing since 2006. PoP was designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact and tenure and promotion to its best advantage, even if you have very few citations. A list of 22 little known use cases can be found in the last episode of this series: Finding the pearls in your citation record.

You can use PoP to decide which journals to submit to, to prepare for a job interview, to do a literature review, to do bibliometric research, to write laudatios or obituaries, to do some homework before meeting your academic hero, or even study the historical development of a discipline. Publish or Perish is a real Swiss army knife.

Download and use of Publish or Perish is and will remain free (gratis), but your contribution toward the costs of hosting, bandwidth, and software development is appreciated. You can make a small donation or buy a copy of the Publish or Perish guide here. Only about one user out of every twenty thousand contributes, so your support is very welcome. If you find Publish or Perish useful, then this is your chance to say "thank you" to the developers.

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Copyright © 2026 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Sat 30 May 2026 14:30

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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