General search: Find academics

Publish or Perish tutorial

Anne-Wil Harzing - Sat 6 Feb 2016 16:10 (updated Thu 2 Jun 2022 10:44)

Note: This tutorial was originally written for Publish or Perish version 4 and all screenshots come from this version. However, the information as such is also applicable for later versions of Publish or Perish.

The Publish or Perish General citation search can be used to find specific academics.

A familiar scenario: tracking down an academic?

Does this scenario sound familiar? You have attended your field’s major academic conference and had a good conversation with someone you really want to follow up with. However, you did not get their business card and forgot their name.

Smart searching through PoP finds the academic in seconds

The only two things you remember is that they were working at the University of Melbourne and published in the Academy of Management of Learning & Education, which is the journal you were talking about. You could go to the University of Melbourne website and review their staff list, but that might be a tedious process. You could go through the table of content of the Academy of Management Learning & Education hoping you remember their name.

However, what would be much simpler is to conduct the search below. This would allow you to refresh your memory in seconds and realize that you had been talking to me ☺ This search strategy will not always lead to such a quick result, but it is worth a try.

Please note: This type of search will NOT work in Microsoft Academic as in this data source any search is automatically restricted to title and abstract, not the entire full-text of articles (where the affiliation would be found).

Google Scholar limitations: affiliation match not always perfect

Please note that this search is not flawless. Google Scholar does not have an “affiliation” field, hence the name of the university will be matched anywhere in the document. The results of our search contain ten articles. Of these only three match our intended search: two by myself, and one by a (former) colleague Ray Zammuto. All the other articles refer to the University of Melbourne somewhere in their paper.

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.