Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations from external data sources; it does not include a database of its own.
Allows importing of externally obtained data from Web of Science, RefMan, EndNote, and many others.
Please note: We cannot guarantee the continued availability of any of these data sources. The Publish or Perish software has been continuously maintained and updated since 2006, and during that time we have seen many changes to data sources and their content.
Although we have been able to keep Publish or Perish compatible with whatever data sources and information were available at any time, unforeseen circumstances may force us to (reluctantly) abandon one or more data sources.
Your continued support and advocacy of both the Publish or Perish software and the external data sources that we use will help to ensure that you and we can keep using Publish or Perish in the future. Thanks in advance for your support to Publish or Perish.
Which data source to use?
This table provides a quick overview of the advantages and disadvantages of the various data sources. Please note that any restrictions and constraints in these data-sources are inherent to these sources. Publish or Perish doesn't restrict or otherwise change results, it is simply an interface to these data sources.
Usually provides cleaner and smaller number of irrelevant results than Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic
Good data source for “any of the words” keyword searches and journal searches by ISSN
Search speed fast to medium
Includes abstracts in results
Typically reports fewer citations than Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic, because it includes fewer journals in some fields and has very limited coverage of books, book chapters and conference papers
Only provides a maximum of 200 results
The use of NOT or AND in keyword searches results is ignored; Crossref reverts to OR searches
Author search is problematic as it is very difficult to disambiguate authors
Year of publication is sometimes - but not always - year of online-first, not year of print publication
Only provides a maximum of 200 results. Full results require (non-free) subscription
Search speed slow, but still acceptable
Typically reports fewer citations than Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic, because it includes fewer journals in some fields and has a limited coverage of books, book chapters and conference papers
Provides cleaner and smaller number of irrelevant results than Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic
Search speed very fast for nearly any kind of searches
Allows wildcards (e.g. global*) for easier searches
Very good data source for keyword searches and journal searches by ISSN
Includes abstracts in results
Requires (non-free) subscription
Only provides a maximum of 200 results
Typically reports fewer citations than all other sources because it includes fewer journals in many fields (esp. Social Sciences and Humanities) and has a very limited coverage of books, book chapters and conference papers.
Typically is last data source to include recent publications as it doesn’t include “in press” papers.
Web master of Harzing.com and developer of the Publish or Perish software, among other things. He holds BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering, a PhD in Operations Research, and likes to watch academic life from a safe distance.
