Using PoP: The columns

Publish or Perish tutorial

Anne-Wil Harzing - Sat 6 Feb 2016 16:10 (updated Thu 2 Jun 2022 11:09)

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.

The columns in the results area of Publish or Perish can be resized to your preference by dragging the lines between them, and will stay that way until you resize them again. Hence you can decide which fields you want to see in full and which are less important.

Reorganizing the display by making columns disappear

You can also make columns “disappear” by making them really small. So if you don’t need the “rank” column (which indicates the order in which the results were ordered in Google Scholar) between the per year and author column, just make it disappear. If for whatever reason you’d like to compare total citations and citations per year directly with the year and journal outlet, just make the author and title field disappear.

Sorting the results by clicking on the column heading

You can also sort the results on any column by clicking on the column heading and sort them the other way around by clicking again. As default the results are sorted by decreasing citations. However, you might want to sort by [cites] per year to see which of your papers have had the biggest impact on a yearly basis.

Sorting on [cites] per year identifies papers with high citation potential

As you can see below some of my 2013 papers (#6 and #12) look like they might become highly cited over the years even though their current citation levels are still modest. You would not be able to spot this as easily when sorting by total citations.

Sorting on author, title, or publication helps with merging or author disambiguation

Sorting by author, title, or publication (source) can also be really useful when you are trying to merge stray citations or when you are devising a strategy to exclude namesakes in another field.

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.