Author disambiguation: Selective exclusion

Publish or Perish tutorial

Anne-Wil Harzing - Sat 6 Feb 2016 16:10 (updated Tue 26 May 2020 13:53)

If the list of results in Publish or Perish is fairly limited, the best way to disambiguate your publications from those of a namesake is selective exclusion.

Manual exclusion

You can manually exclude irrelevant publications from the analysis by checking or clearing the boxes in the Results list. Here are some shortcuts:

• The Check all button places check marks in all boxes;
• The Uncheck all button clears all boxes;
• When you use the keyboard to travel up and down in the Results list, pressing the space bar toggles the check mark on and off on the selected line.

Exclude a range of items

You can also select a consecutive range of items in the list (left-click on the first item, then hold either Shift key and left-click on the last item) and use the Check selection/Uncheck selection buttons to check/uncheck all selected items and recalculate the citation statistics.

Sorting by column helps with exclusions

Selecting relevant publications can be made easier by first sorting the results by Cites, Authors, Title, Year, Publication, or Publisher. Sorting is done simply by clicking on the corresponding column heading. Click twice to reverse the sort order. Sorting by author is often a very effective way to exclude a range of publications in one go as one can easily identify authors with inappropriate initials or recognize irrelevant co-authors.

Changes in results list take effect immediately

In contrast to the refinements described in other tips, changes in the Results list take effect immediately and are reflected in the summary field. You do not have to resubmit your search.

Support Publish or Perish

The development of the Publish or Perish software is a volunteering effort that has been ongoing since 2006. Download and use of Publish or Perish is and will remain free (gratis), but your support toward the costs of hosting, bandwidth, and software development are appreciated. Your support helps further development of Publish or Perish for new data sources and additional features.

Feedback

PS: If you are using Publish or Perish on a regular basis, please take 5 minutes to provide me with some feedback.