Publish or Perish tutorial

Publish or Perish tutorial

Anne-Wil Harzing - Sat 6 Feb 2016 16:10 (updated Sat 15 Apr 2023 07:22)

Note: This tutorial was originally written for Publish or Perish v4 and all screenshots come from this version. However, the information as such is also applicable for later versions of Publish or Perish.

Through my technical support for Publish or Perish over the last 10 years and the Publish or Perish Survey, I have come to realise that there is room for improvement in the way most PoP users use the program. Obviously, there are many help resources: a help file, an FAQ and the Publish or Perish book. However, most users don’t seem to consult those.

Tutorial: 80 PoP tips

This tutorial of 80 tips therefore takes a different approach and introduces the user to the main functions of Publish or Perish in short and easy chunks. Most sections can be read independently, but the collection is structured in a logical order, so you can work through it doing one section at a time.

Finding out your publications, citations and h-index

We will start out with the most common usage scenario (see screenshot), academics searching for their own name, usually to find their publications, citations and h-index. In doing so we also discuss in detail how to disambiguate author names.

Journal search, General search, and Multi-query center

In addition to an author search, Publish or Perish also provides the option to do a journal search. For more demanding users, the general search function opens up a host of additional search options. The multi-query center stores all of your queries and allows for sophisticated query management.

From query export to promotion, from job interview to literature review, and much more...

Amongst many other things, you will learn about a multitude of metrics, how to manage, import and export your queries, how to use PoP to make your case for tenure or promotion, how to decide which journals to submit to, how to prepare for a job interview, how to do a literature review, and even how to do bibliometric research.

Google Scholar limitations

Although Google Scholar typically provides better coverage than Scopus or the Web of Science, it is not a bibliometric database. Instead it relies on parsing scholarly literature on the Web. Therefore, this tutorial also covers the main limitations of Google Scholar, including lack of discipline filtering, truncation of author and journal names, and the occasional wrong parsing of years, master records, author names.

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Development of the Publish or Perish software is a volunteering effort that has been ongoing since 2006, regularly adding new features and data sources and expanding use cases and geographical distribution.

To keep Publish or Perish free (gratis) for everyone, your contribution toward the costs of hosting, bandwidth, and software development is appreciated. If you find Publish or Perish useful, then this is your chance to say "thank you" to the developers.

You can support us by buying the Publish or Perish guide or tutorial and/or through a donation. Only one user out of every five thousand contributes (that is, only 0.02% of all users!), so any support is very welcome indeed.

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