Multi-query center: Re-importing

Publish or Perish tutorial

Anne-Wil Harzing - Sat 6 Feb 2016 16:10 (updated Thu 2 Jun 2022 10:47)

Note: This tutorial was originally written for Publish or Perish version 4 and all screenshots come from this version. Later versions of Publish or Perish show the multi-query center at the top of every screen for easier access. Its basic functions are similar to PoP4, however.

As described in the section on exporting, you can export the results of a query to for instance Excel. Subsequently you can re-import this file into Publish or Perish.

Making corrections to results and recalculate stats

This can be useful if you want to make minor corrections to the results and then have PoP recalculate the statistics. You might for instance want to:

• Adjust years that Google Scholar or Microsoft Academic parsed wrongly.
• Complete truncated titles or author lists.
• Correct titles for records where Google Scholar parsed the wrong version of the paper as a master record.
• Remove irrelevant publications altogether, instead of un-ticking them in PoP. This will make it easier to subsequently clean up the results further by merging as you have fewer records to work with.

Procedure

In order to do follow these steps:

1. Right-click on the query you wish to export.
2. Chose Save as CSV and give the file a meaningful name.
3. Open the file in Excel by double-clicking on it. [Note: Don’t worry if you see strange squiggly letters; this is just Excel not coping well with accented letters. They will be fine once you reimport the data into PoP].
4. Make the required changes.
5. Save the file again in CSV format. [Note: if you use a Mac, you will have to use Save as Windows CSV, Don’t ask me why: long story, Mac format doesn’t play nice].
6. Reimport the file into Publish or Perish by clicking on the New Import icon (see Multiquery Center).

Worked example: corrected data

As an example the two screenshots below show my six most highly cited publications (unmerged) on a citations per year basis. The first screenshot shows the original data. The second screenshot shows the corrected data. Changes made were:

• Change the year for the third publication from 2007 to 2008, the correct publication year.
• Change the year for a publication parsed as 2013 (as online first publication date) to 2014 (as print publication date). [See also Google Scholar: Inconsistent year].
• Change the title for the third publication into its correct title (the reported title is the title of an earlier working paper).

Old results

New results

Effect of the corrections

As a result, the citations per year for the third paper increased from 46.50 per year to 53.14 per year. Changes for the language barrier and trust formation paper were more dramatic as its citations per year increased from 17 to 34, making it my 6th most highly cited paper per year instead of my 27th most highly cited.

Conclusion

Obviously, one would not go through the effort of manually correcting the results for every single search. However, the ability to make corrections and re-import the data might be a life-saver for one-off important occasions such as an application for tenure or promotion.

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.