Author disambiguation: Use year restrictions

Publish or Perish tutorial

Anne-Wil Harzing - Sat 6 Feb 2016 16:10 (updated Thu 2 Jun 2022 10:35)

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.

If you know that a certain author has only published after (or before) a certain year, you can enter the start or end years in the Year of publication between ... and ... fields Publish or Perish. This makes it much easier to disambiguate an author from a namesake from another generation.

Analyse publications for specific period

You can also use these fields if you want to analyse the author's publications from a specific period only. For instance you could look at someone’s publications, citations and h-index in the last five years alone.

Careful: Sometimes Google Scholar does not parse the year

In some cases Google Scholar's parsing does not include the year of publication in the cited work. This means that if you restrict the years of publication, this work will not always show up (as there is no year field). Although Google Scholar is constantly improving these parsing errors, for important searches it is safer to quickly re-run the analysis without the year restrictions and check whether there are any highly cited works without a year indication in the results.

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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.

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