Google Scholar: Book edition cites

Publish or Perish tutorial

Anne-Wil Harzing - Sat 6 Feb 2016 16:10 (updated Thu 2 Jun 2022 11:07)

Three editions of a textbook

Many books, including academic textbooks, but also successful research monographs, go through several editions. Below is the third edition of my IHRM textbook. The first edition was published in 1995, the second in 2004. [Google Scholar does not seem to have picked up the 4th edition (2014) yet.]

Citing works predating the cited work

346 cites is quite a respectable number of citations for such a young book, but if we look at the citing works in Publish or Perish, we understand why. Many of the citing works date from well before 2010. In fact, only about 100 citations dated from 2011 onwards.

All cites aggregated to latest edition leading to high cites/year value

Google Scholar simply aggregates all citations to a book to its latest edition. So if a book has multiple editions with the same title, all citations will be attributed to its latest edition. As a result these books usually have very high citation per year rates and end up being at the top of the ranking for most academics when you sort on the [cites] per year column.

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