Google Scholar Profile

Information about Google Scholar Profile queries

The Google Scholar Profile search pane in Publish or Perish allows you to look up a Google Scholar profile and analyse the associated publication metrics. The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard (for pasting into other applications) or saved to a text file (for future reference or further analysis).

How to look up a Google Scholar profile

To look up a Google Scholar profile:

  1. Enter the name and optionally the affiliation of the person whose profile you are looking for;
  2. Click Search or press the Enter key.

The program will now contact Google Scholar to obtain a list of (partial) profile matches. If there is more than one match, Publish or Perish will show the Select Google Scholar Profile dialog box with the matching profiles; you can use this dialog box to select the profile that you are interested in.

Once you have selected the profile, or automatically if there was exactly one match, Publish or Perish will retrieve the profile information from Google Scholar and show the results list and calculate the citation metrics. The metrics and list of results can be exported in a variety of formats.

Attributes

This pane contains the following fields.

Option Description
Publish or Perish 6.32 and later
Profile name Shows the name and optionally the affiliation of the profile's author. This field is read-only; to choose a different Google Scholar profile, click the Find a profile... button.
Find a profile... Click this button to open the Select Google Scholar Profile dialog box, which lets you search for and select one or more Google Scholar profiles for retrieval.
Profile ID

Shows the internal Google Scholar profile ID for the current profile. If you know the profile's ID then you can enter it here and click Lookup to retrieve its data directly, without going through the Find a profile... selection. This option is particularly useful to access profiles that are excluded from normal name searches.

The second (read-only) field shows the labels which were set by the profile's author.

Publish or Perish 6.31 and earlier
Profile name or ID

Enter the name of the profile you want to look up. The recommended format is to use the author's name with one or more initials and possibly an affiliation, for example M Brown Monash University. Do not "quote" any part of the profile name.

Once you have clicked Lookup and the profile selection is complete, the contents of this field will be replaced by the full profile name and affiliation as obtained from Google Scholar.

For more search tips, see Author search.

PoP 6.27 or later: You can now also add a raw Google Scholar Profile ID in this search field. Publish or Perish will then retrieve the profile's contents directly, without first trying to find the user profile based on name or affiliation. This option is particularly useful to access profiles that are excluded from normal name searches.

Profile labels

Enter the labels that must appear in the profile that you want to lookup. Please note the following:

  • Profile labels are set by each profile's author based on his or her own preferences. They are not necessarily consistent or predictable between authors, or complete for any given author.
  • If a single label consists of several words, then you must "quote the words". For example, expatriation "international business" multinational is interpreted as three labels, with the middle one consisting of two words.
(The remainder is common to all Publish or Perish versions)
Annual citations

Summarizes the annual increase in citations for the given profile as provided by Google Scholar.

Show profile Click this button to open the selected Google Scholar profile in your web browser.
Copy citations Click this button to copy the contents of the Annual citations field (only) in tab-delimited format to the Windows clipboard, from where you can paste it into other programs, for example spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice Calc, Apple Numbers, or SoftMaker PlanMaker, or into word processing or database programs.
Lookup (PoP6)
Search (PoP7)

Multi-function button with the following functions.

Note: The [Default] function is obtained by clicking on the main part if the button; the alternate functions appear on a drop-down menu when you click on the drop-down arrow on the button.

  • Lookup - [Default] Look up the profile. If possible, the query is satisfied from the local Publish or Perish cache; this saves time and reduces the load on Google Scholar. If no cache entry for the query exists or the entry is older than the maximum cache age, then the query is forwarded to Google Scholar. After the results are received from Google Scholar, the local cache is automatically refreshed.
  • Lookup Direct - Submit the query directly to Google Scholar, bypassing the local Publish or Perish cache. This may be useful if you suspect that Google Scholar may have newer information than is available through the local cache. When the results are returned from Google Scholar, the local cache is automatically refreshed.
  • Mark for Lookup - Do not perform the query yet, but mark it (with error code 35) for later lookup, for example as part of a batch lookup from the queries list.

Tip: You can change the maximum cache age in the Preferences: Google Scholar Profile dialog box, which is accessible through the Tools > Preferences command.

Note: It is not useful to perform multiple direct lookups for the same query shortly after another; this merely increases the load on Google Scholar and increases the chance that your computer may be temporarily denied access by Google Scholar. We recommend that you only use the Lookup Direct function as a last resort.

Clear All Clears all query fields. You can use this to quickly prepare the fields for an entirely new query.
Revert Restores the query fields to their previous state. This function is only available as long as you have not performed a lookup with the current query fields.
Copy

Multi-function button that copies the results or metrics belonging to the current query to the Windows clipboard in one of the following ways. See Exporting your data for information about these formats.

Note: The [Default] function is obtained by clicking on the main part if the button; the alternate functions appear on a drop-down menu when you click on the drop-down arrow on the button.

New

Multi-function button that creates a new query object, as follows.

Note: If you click on the main part of the button, a new query of the same type as the current one (i.e., Google Scholar Profile) will be created; the alternate functions appear on a drop-down menu when you click on the drop-down arrow on the button.

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