Journal Metrics - Citation Analysis - Research Guides at Harvard Library

 Source: http://guides.library.harvard.edu/hks/citation_analysis

Journal Metrics

Journal Metrics

Journal metrics are used to identify key journals in a research
field.  This identification may be most useful to authors who are
considering which journals to submit manuscripts to for future
publication.


The Impact Factor may be the most familiar metric in academia. Eugene
Garfield of Thomson Scientific first introduced this idea in the 1950s.
Impact Factor calculations are now available through Thomson’s Journal
Citation Reports (JCR) and the Elsevier product, Scopus. However, each
database tends to be biased in favor of including journals that are
published by that particular publisher.


Despite their merits, journal metrics can be misused particularly in
the evaluation of individual authors. Newer measures of impact are
decribed on the altmetrics tab and provide an alternate way to evaluate scholarly impact.

Conducting Literature Reviews

Scholars will often publish journal articles that assess and
evaluate the top ranked journals in their field. Conduct a search in a
large interdisciplinary database such as Proquest Social Sciences Premium Collection or EBSCO's Academic Search Premier using
keywords such as "top journals" or "highly ranked journals" and the
field. For example, you could search in Academic Search Premier using
the terms "top ranked journals" and "economics". You can also select a
narrower subject specific database such as EconLit.  Alternatively search across a number of different databases for full-text articles using the Google Scholar search option.

Harvard Databases

• 
  
  
  Journal Citation Reports
  
  

  • 
    
    

  Published
  by Thomson Reuters, Journal Citation Reports is a resource for journal
  evaluation, using citation data drawn from over 8,400 scholarly and
  technical journals worldwide in the sciences and social sciences.
  Coverage is both multidisciplinary and international, and incorporates
  journals from over 3,000 publishers in 60 nations. 1999-present.
  Publication coverage is uneven and tends to include a high number of
  Thomson Reuters publications.

Free Web Sites

• 
  
  
  Academic Journal Guide
  

  A
  guide published by the Association of Business Schools, that evaluates
  the quality of journals in which business and management academics
  publish their research. Based on a combination of peer review, editorial
  and expert evluations and citation metrics. Free registration required.
• 
  
  
  Publish or Perish
  

  Publish
  or Perish is a free author and journal impact metrics software program
  developed by Anne Wil Harzing that retrieves and analyzes citations to
  articles and books. The software uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw
  citations. Analyzes and presents article citation statistics for authors
  and journal titles. The tool can be used to locate most cited articles
  and books by searching in general citations field.
• 
  
  
  SCImago Journal & Country Rank
  

  The
  SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the
  journals and country scientific indicators developed from the
  information contained in the Scopus® database (published by Elsevier).
  These indicators can be used to assess and analyze scientific domains.
  This indicator shows the visibility of the journals contained in the
  Scopus® database from 1996.

Google Metrics

• 
  
  
  Google Scholar Metrics
  

  Browse
  the top 100 publications in several languages, ordered by their
  five-year h-index and h-median metrics. Also, search for publications by
  their titles, and then compare the publications that are of interest to
  you. Finally, if you wish to see which articles in a publication were
  cited the most and who cited them, click on its h-index number to view
  the articles as well as the citations underlying the metrics.
  
  You
  can also explore publications in research areas of interest to you. To
  browse publications in a broad area of research, select one of the areas
  in the left column.

Altmetrics/ Other Metrics

Article & Author Level Metrics

• 
  
  
  Google Scholar Citations
  

  You
  must register for a Google account to use this service using an academic
  email account. Track citations to your publications. Check to see what
  authors are citing to your publications. Graph your citations over time.
  
  
  
  Authors of scholarly articles should check their Google Scholar page to
  verify that your publications listings are accurate and comprehensive.
• 
  
  
  PLoS Publications
  

  PLoS
  is a nonprofit organization founded in 2000 by biomedical scientists to
  makes scientific and medical literature available to public. In 2003,
  the publisher started an open access scientific and medical publishing
  arm with high-quality journals including its flagship, peer reviewed
  publication, PLos One. In March 2009, PLoS introduced article-level
  metrics to provide a measure of merit for individual articles rather
  than merely journal metrics.
• 
  
  
  Publish or Perish
  

  Publish
  or Perish is a free author and journal impact metrics software program
  developed by Anne Wil Harzing that retrieves and analyzes citations to
  articles and books. The software uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw
  citations. Analyzes and presents article citation statistics for authors
  and journal titles. The tool can be used to locate most cited articles
  and books by searching in general citations field.

• 
  
  
  Web of Science
  
  

  • 
    
    

  A
  multidisciplinary database, with searchable author abstracts, covering
  the journal literature of the sciences, social sciences and arts.
  Generate citation reports by author. Create citation maps for articles.

Defining Altmetrics

The terms "altmetrics"
(alternative metrics) and "article level metrics" have been used to
describe approaches to measure the impact of scholarship by using new
social media tools such as bookmarks, links, blog postings, inclusion in
citation management tools and tweets to gauge the importance of
scholarly output.


Proponents
of altmetrics believe that using altmetrics will help measure the
impact of an article in a more comperhensive and objective way thaa was
done perviously with journal metrics databases like Journal Citation
Reports.  However, there are limits to this approach and caution should
be used to not rely on any one particular measure in evaluting the
importance of scholarship.

Altmetrics

• 
  
  
  Altmetrics, a manefesto
  

  Web
  site devoted to altmetrics. Started by group of librarians and
  researchers who are active in promoting altmetrics as an alternative to
  more traditional forms of tracking article impact.
• 
  
  
  Impact Story
  

  ImpactStory aggregates altmetrics measures from articles, datasets, blog posts, and more.
• 
  
  
  Peer Evaluation
  

  Peer
  Evaluation is a web site for giving open access to primary data,
  working papers, articles, media and having the works reviewed and
  discussed by your peers. Peer evaluation is a strong supporter of
  qualified peer reviewing and considers their web site a valuable
  supplement, inspiration and hub for peer reviewed journals and
  publications.
• 
  
  
  Scholarometer
  

  Scholarometer
  is a browser extension designed for crowdsourcing scholarly data by
  using Google Scholar citations to measure scholarly impact. You have to
  install the extension in your browser (Chrome or Firefox).

Journal Metrics - Citation Analysis - Research Guides at Harvard Library

E-visibility - E-visibility - LibGuides at University of South Africa (UNISA)

 Source: http://libguides.unisa.ac.za/e-visibility/e-visibility1

This
library guide provides guidance to researchers in creating and
maintaining an online presence on the Web. Attention will be given to
developing an online presence with focus on the formal researcher
e-profiles such as ORCID, Thomson Reuter's ResearcherID, Elsevier's
SciVal Experts and Google Scholar's Citation profile. Attention will
also be given to developing an online research presence using social
media tools and platforms.

Explore the different options suggested in the library guide. Please feel free to contact your librarian if you need any assistance.

Creating an online presence allows you as researcher and your research to become e-visible instead of invisible! 

E-visibility - E-visibility - LibGuides at University of South Africa (UNISA)

Bibliometrics - Bibliometrics and Altmetrics: Measuring the Impact of Knowledge - LibGuides at University of Maryland Libraries

Source: http://lib.guides.umd.edu/bibliometrics/bibliometrics

DEFINITION: Bibliometrics

Bibliometrics,
or research impact, is the quantitative method of citation and content
analysis for scholarly journals, books and researchers. The quantitative
impact of a given publication is appraised by measuring the amount of
times a certain work is cited by other resources.  By implication, you
can measure the influence or 'impact' that a given work has on the rest
of academic literature.  Bibliometrics should always be supplemented by
qualitative peer review and a strong argument on impact in a personal
statement.


Bibliometrics is based upon statistical sampling.  It is based upon
certain assumptions.  These assumptions must be accounted for in any
appraisal.

Limitations of bibliometrics

In this short video, Dr. Kevin Lalor, School of Social
Sciences and Law, Dublin Institute of Technology, highlights some of the
limitations of use of journal impact data in the social sciences and
humanities and all the types of publication that are missed.

How to Find Citation Impact?

To tell your impact story, you need to find the citation count of your research papers through citation databases and alternative metrics tools.
They are key instruments that allow a user to understand the impact of
an individual published paper or of a researcher's body of work.
Citation databases and altmetrics tools can be used for the following:

• To show the impact an article has by showing the number of times it has been cited since it was published.
• To compile the references that the author of the publication used.
• To identify and read the most influential publications in a particular field.
• To find related work and to track the development of a certain publication.

It is important to note that not all databases have a complete record of information regarding a certain published item. It would be wise to use multiple databases to fully utilize this feature.

White Paper

• 
  
  
  
  Using Bibliometrics
  
  
  

A Guide to Evaluating Research Performance with Citation Data


"If you can measure that of which you speak, and can express it
by a number, you know something of your subject; but if you cannot
measure it, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory."


~ William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

Pendlebury, D. A. (n.d.). Using Bibliometrics in Evaluating Research (White Paper). Research Department, Thomson Reuters, Philadelphia, PA USA.

 

Ten Rules in Using Publication and Citation AnalysIs

1. Consider whether available data can address the question.
2. Choose publication types, field definitions, and years of data.
3. Decide on whole or fractional counting.
4. Judge whether data require editing to remove “artifacts”.
5. Compare like with like.
6. Use relative measures, not just absolute counts.
7. Obtain multiple measures.
8. Recognize the skewed nature of citation data.
9. Confirm that the data collected are relevant to the question.
10. Ask whether the results are reasonable.

Bibliometrics - Bibliometrics and Altmetrics: Measuring the Impact of Knowledge - LibGuides at University of Maryland Libraries

Journal Metrics Overview - Wiley Online Library

 Source: http://olabout.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-828125.html

Journal Metrics Overview

Some of the most common journal metrics are described in the table
below. “JCR Year” refers to the Journal Citation Report year, which is
the individual year for which a metric is provided.

Metric Name	Metric Source	Metric Description
Impact Factor	Web of Science	The Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year. The Impact Factor is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the two previous years. Also see: "Understanding Impact Factors"
5-Year Impact Factor	Web of Science	The 5-year Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year. It is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the five previous years. Also see: "Four Ways of Measuring Impact"
Altmetrics	(Any source)	Altmetrics go beyond more traditional citation metrics to measure social visibility around scientific articles. These metrics are based on a broad spectrum of indicators, such as tweets, blog mentions, news media, social bookmarking, article views, and downloads. Also see: "Using Altmetrics and Social Media for Research and Networking"
Eigenfactor	Web of Science	The Eigenfactor is based on weighted citations in the JCR year to papers published within the previous 5 years. Citations are weighted according to the prestige of the citing journal, with citations from highly ranked journals making a larger contribution to the Eigenfactor than those from poorly ranked journals. Also see: "The Eigenfactor and Other Metrics – Plus Ça Change"
Google Scholar Metrics	Google Scholar	The main Google Scholar journal metric is the H5 index and is based on articles published in the last 5 complete calendar years. This is similar to the h-Index but also includes the top cited h articles (h-core) and the median of the citation counts (h-median). Also see: "Demystifying Google Scholar Search and Results"
h-index	Web of Science, Google Scholar, or Scopus	The h-index attempts to measure the productivity and citation impact of the published body of work of an author. The h-index indicates the number of papers, h, that have been cited at least h times (e.g. an h-index of 15 means that 15 papers have been cited at least 15 times each.) Note: Due to variations in citation coverage between databases, each source may determine a different value of the h-index for each author. Also see: "Four Reasons Why the h-index is Here to Stay"
Immediacy Index	Web of Science	The Immediacy Index is the average number of times an article is cited in the year it is published. The Immediacy Index is calculated by dividing the number of citations to articles published in a given year by the number of articles published in that year. Also see: "How to Navigate the World of Citation Metrics"
SJR	Scopus	The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) Indicator is based on weighted citations in Year X to papers published in the previous 3 years. Citations are weighted by the prestige of the citing journal, so that a citation from a top journal will have more impact than a citation from a low-ranked journal. Also see: "Metrics Alternatives to Altmetrics?"
SNIP	Scopus	The Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) measures average citations in Year X to papers published in the previous 3 years. Citations are weighted by the citation potential of the journal’s subject category, thereby making the metric more comparable across different disciplines. Also see: "Can We Do Better Than Existing Author Citation Metrics?"

Journal Metrics Overview - Wiley Online Library

Metrics - Criminology, Law & Society - Research Guides at University of California Irvine

 Source: http://guides.lib.uci.edu/criminology/databases/metrics

Google Scholar Metrics

Google Scholar Metrics

"Google Scholar Metrics enable authors to gauge the visibility and
influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Scholar Metrics
summarize recent citations to many publications, to help authors as they
consider where to publish their new research.


To get started, browse the top 100 publications in several languages,
ordered by their five-year h-index and h-median metrics. To see which
articles in a publication were cited the most and who cited them, click
on its h-index number to view the articles as well as the citations
underlying the metrics.


To browse publications in a broad area of research, select one of the areas in the left column. For example: SOCIAL SCIENCE.


To explore specific research areas, select one of the broad areas like  SOCIAL SCIENCE, click on the "Subcategories" link and then select one of the options. For example,   "Top publications - Criminology, Criminal Law & Policing" ...

• 
  
  
  Google Scholar: Top publications - Criminology, Criminal Law & Policing
  

  Google
  Scholar Metrics uses the H-Index formula to rank journals. The Metrics
  Home Page lists the top 100 h5-index ranked publications in English.
  More importantly, it lists the top ranked publications by subject area.
  "The h5-index is the h-index for articles published in the last 5
  complete years. It is the largest number h such that h articles
  published in 2007-2011 have at least h citations."
• 
  
  
  Google Scholar: Top publications (English language)
  
  
• 
  
  
  About Google Scholar Metrics
  

  "Google
  Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the
  visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications.
  Scholar Metrics summarize recent citations to many publications, to help
  authors as they consider where to publish their new research..."

Impact - Journals

ISI's Journal Citation Reports and Washington & Lee's Law Journals: Submissions and Ranking can show you the most frequently cited and highest impact journals in law, criminology and penology.

• 
  
  
  Journal Citation Reports® (ISI ~ Web of Science)*
  

  Evaluate
  and compare journals using citation data drawn from over 7,500
  scholarly and technical journals from more than 3,300 publishers in over
  60 countries ...

  more...
  
  
• 
  
  
  Law Journals: Submissions and Ranking (Washington & Lee University School of Law)
  

  Counted
  citations are those which cite journal volumes published in the
  preceding eight years. The reason for this limit is to prevent a bias in
  favor of long-published journals...
• 
  
  
  Ulrich's Periodicals Directory*
  

  "Ulrichsweb.com
  is the authoritative source of bibliographic and publisher information
  on more than 300,000 periodicals of all types — academic and scholarly
  journals, Open Access publications, peer-reviewed titles, popular
  magazines, newspapers, ..."

  more...
  
  

Impact - Articles

Sources for finding citation counts and subsequent cited papers

• 
  
  
  eScholarship
  

  The repository is a service of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library.
• 
  
  
  Google Scholar
  

  Search results include "Cited By" and "Web Search" references.
  Included
  are "Related Articles" based on the Google search algorithm and "Web
  Search" for locating documents that include the search term or citation.
• 
  
  
  Key Cite. Westlaw Campus*
  
  
• 
  
  
  Shepard's Citations *
  

  The
  earliest citation indices were legal citators such as Shepard's
  Citations (nee, 1873). Westlaw's citator tool is known as Key Cite.
• 
  
  
  Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
  

  SSRN
  consists of two parts: an Abstract Database containing abstracts on
  over 289,500 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an
  Electronic Paper Collection currently containing over 240,200
  downloadable full text documents. SSRN also includes the research papers
  of a number of so-called Fee Based Partner Publications.

  more...
  
  
• 
  
  
  Web of Science *
  

  Use
  "Cited Author Search" to locate by principal author, journal title, and
  publication year. The alternative is to use "General Search" by author
  name, topic, or year.

Metrics - Criminology, Law & Society - Research Guides at University of California Irvine

Maximize Your Research Impact - Transforming Scholarly Communication & Publishing - University at Buffalo Libraries

 Source: http://library.buffalo.edu/scholarly/action/

Maximize Your Research Impact

Easy as 1-2-3:

• Step 1: Identify the right journal
  But, before you submit your manuscript, make sure to…
• Step 2: Increase the visibility/discoverability of your scholarship
  Finally,
• Step 3: Track citation-based metrics for your articles

---

Step 1: Identify the right journal

First, think about which journal has the
appropriate scope and audience of researchers interested in your
research. The more your research is read; the more it will be used and
cited by others.  Journal home pages and more experienced colleagues
can provide guidance.






Second, identify which journals publish research similar to yours. (Read More)










Third, evaluate the journal impact factor
which tells you how often the average article published with the last
two years has been cited. The journal impact factor and many other journal-level citation metrics can be found by searching Journal Citation Reports, which uses Web of Science citation data. (Read More)








What if a journal is not listed in the Journal Citations Reports. (Read More)









Fourth, consider journal affordability. Check the
subscription price, especially for institutions and the number of
libraries maintaining current subscriptions using WorldCat, a master catalog of North American library holdings. (Read More)









Fifth, find out if there are good peer reviewed open access journals in your field using the Directory of Open Access Journals.  There may be an article processing fee, but your work can be freely read by any researcher in the world. (Read More)

---

Step 2: Increase the visibility/discoverability of your scholarship

• Reserve your right to post an open access (OA) preprint, final manuscript, or published version of your article. (Read More)
• Be sure to use your full name and standard institutional name/address to assure easily identifiable citations to your work.
• Pay special attention to writing a descriptive title and an informative abstract.

---

Step 3: Track citation-based metrics for your articles

There are many tools that track citations to your work and calculate
standard metrics for tenure/promotion dossiers and other career
purposes. Resources include personal profiles, subscription databases,
and free web services. For example:




Personal Profiles

• ORCID – a new,
  broadly supported researcher profile that creates a unique author
  identification number. By creating an authoritative publication list
  associated with your id number, you can minimize confusion with other
  researchers with similar names.
• ResearcherID
  – an older id system associated with the Web of Science (WOS). Your
  ORCID and ResearcherID profiles can easily be linked. Citation counts
  for publications in ResearchID are automatically updated from WOS.

Subscription Databases (UB)

• Web of Science
  – the premier citation database covering journal articles from all
  disciplines, including social sciences and humanities, despite its
  name. (Read More)

• SciFinder
  – a broadly based science database focusing on chemistry, life,
  environmental, materials sciences, and physics. Citations since 1996
  are recorded. There is no citation report feature.  

Free Web

• Harzing’s Publish or Perish
  - By far, the best free web tool that uses Google Scholar data to
  calculate many citation metrics. Citations to and from all forms of
  scholarly material are captured, including articles, conference papers,
  book chapters (especially important to the Humanities and Social
  Science disciplines), patents, and technical report. Hence, metrics may
  be higher than Web of Science. Downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux
  systems.
• Google Scholar My Citations – Only tracks your own publications.

The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Libraries maintain a detailed citation analysis guide worth consulting.



It is important to identify the best citation resources for your
field. Getting an accurate, complete citation count is a complex
process requiring in-depth knowledge of the underlying database. Please
contact Mark Ludwig, Scholarly Communications Officer, A. Ben Wagner, Sciences Librarian, or your departmental library liaison to discuss your specific needs.

---

Last Updated: 9/17/2015



Maximize Your Research Impact - Transforming Scholarly Communication & Publishing - University at Buffalo Libraries

Impact of Authors - Measuring Research Impact - Research Guides at City University of Hong Kong

 Source: http://libguides.library.cityu.edu.hk/researchimpact/authorimpact

Publication activities of authors

A way to assess an author's research impact is to evalute the publication activities of the author. Some common measures are:

• The amount of his/her publications
• The amount of citations that his/her publications have attracted
• The impact/quality of the journals in which his/her papers have published (refer to the "Impact of journals" page for more)

The following Library-subscribed and free databases offer tools for you to get the above data. Click on a tool below to see how it can be used to measure the research impact of authors:

• Citation Report via Web of Science
• Citation Overview via Scopus
• Free tools to be used with Google Scholar

The h-index - a measure to evaluate an author's impact

What is h-index?



The h-index was developed in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch to quantify the research achievement of physicists based on the amount of their publications and the number of citations these publications have attracted.
Both the productivity and the impact of the researchers can then be
measured. Now, the h-index has been applied in other research fields as
well.







A researcher with an index of h has published h papers, each of which has been cited by other papers at least h times. For example, if the h-index of an author is 8, this means that 8 of this author's papers have been cited 8 times or more.







Which databases provide h-index score?



Web of Science and Scopus
calculate the h-index of authors for you based on the publication and
citation information of the journals they index. A list of publications
is ranked in descending order by the number of times they have been
cited. The value of h is equal to the number of papers (N) in the list that have N or more citations.



To learn more about how to locate the h-index of authors from these
two databases, select an option in the "Publication activities of
authors" box above.

                                                                                     [From Web of Science] 

Your author profiles

If you have publications indexed in "Web of Science" and "Scopus", remember to verify your author profiles in these two databases to ensure accurate measurement of your publication activities. These two databases allow you to distinguish between your publications and those written by others with similar names.



Make sure your author profiles contains all your publications indexed in the databases. If not, add them to your profile. If you have just joined CityU, remember to add “City University of Hong Kong” as an assembling affiliation in your author profiles (e.g. in databases such as Web of Science - registration is required). For the Scopus database, the affiliation displayed in the author profile is based on your most recent publication.



You may also register for an ORCID account, a unique ID
for researchers. This account allows you to link your Scopus Author ID
and your Web of Science Researcher ID to put together all your
publication records. Your ORCID can then be included in your own author
file, CV, grant proposals or reports.



Refer to the guides below for more:

• 
  
  
  
  Managing ResearcherID in Web of Science
  
  
  
• 
  
  
  
  Managing your author record in Scopus
  
  
  

Embedding altmetrics data into your online profiles

Refer to "How to make use of altmetrics tools" on the "Altmetrics" page of this guide.

Impact of Authors - Measuring Research Impact - Research Guides at City University of Hong Kong

Altmetrics - Altmetrics - Research Guides at University of Southern California

 Source: http://libguides.usc.edu/c.php?g=393834&p=2675754

Altmetrics: Altmetrics

• 
  
  Altmetrics
  
  
• 
  
  Other Metrics
  
  
  
  Toggle Dropdown
  
  
  

What is Almterics?

Altmetrics refer to "alternative metrics" or
"article-level metrics." As the internet accelerated dissemination of
scholarly work, scholars wanted a way to evaluate a work's impact beyond
the more traditional methods of citation counts and journal impact
factors. Altmetrics attempts to fill that gap by using social media
mentions, link backs, blogs, news outlet coverage, and other web metrics
to measure the impact of a particular work. Altmetrics are especially
well  suited to datasets and types of scholarly work not covered by
traditional metrics. As with other metrics, the Altmetric score doesn't
necessarily tell you anything about the quality of the individual
publication. It's always best to review the publication yourself and
investigate mentions as need be.

Tools

Journals published by Springer, Wiley, Nature Publishing Group,
and select Elsevier publications are now including altmetric tabs on
individual articles.

• 
  
  
  Almetric Bookmarklet
  

  Free bookmarklet that displays cites, saves, links, and social media mentions for individual articles.
• 
  
  
  Impact Story
  

  A
  paid subscription designed for individual authors. Includes metrics for
  data sets, slide decks, websites, and other nontraditional publications.
• 
  
  
  Nature Publishing Group
  

  All journals in the Nature Publishing Group have a tab for article level metrics powered by Almetric.com
• 
  
  
  Public Library of Science (PLoS)
  

  PLoS provides their own article level metrics for all publications.
• 
  
  
  Publish or Perish
  

  A downloadable software program that uses Google Scholar data to create a impact profile for individual authors.

In USC Libraries Main Search option
an Altmetric button will now appear if/when there is altmetric data
available for a given publication. By mousing-over the altmetric button
you will see what online activity or attention the work has received. In
addition, each of the platforms/sites listed is linked to
a ProQuest/Altmetric website (that opens in a new page) which includes a
list of the mentions for you to explore:







If you click on the button a new page will open taking you to a joint ProQuest/Altmetric website that
includes  more detailed information (demographics, geography of
mention,and an option to set up alerts if/when this publication is
mentioned in the future). This button will also show up on the Find It @
USC Sidebar and Results Pages if there is data available.

Using Almetric Bookmarklet

Altmetric Bookmarklet
can be used in Firefox, Google Chrome, or Safari. It is a free bookmark
tool from Altmetric.org which creates other products for analyzing
almetrics through paid subscriptions.Clicking the bookmarklet will
display a colorful wheel containing the article score and additional
information about where it was mentioned.

• The Bookmarklet only works on pages containing a DOI
• It only supports publishers who embed Google Scholar friendly citation metadata on their pages by default
• Twitter mentions are only available for articles published since July 2011

Altmetrics - Altmetrics - Research Guides at University of Southern California

Musings about librarianship: 8 surprising things I learnt about Google Scholar

 Source: http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.my/2014/06/8-surprising-things-i-learnt-about.html

8 surprising things I learnt about Google Scholar

Google Scholar is increasingly becoming a subject that an academic librarian cannot afford to be ignorant about.

Various surveys have shown usage of Google Scholar is rising among researchers, particularly beginning and intermediate level researchers.  Our own internal statistics such as link resolver statistics and views of Libguides on Google Scholar, tell a similar story. 

Of course, researchers including librarians have taken note of this and
there is intense interest in details about Google Scholar.



I noticed for example in April....

More recently there was also the release of a Google Scholar Digest  that is well worth reading.

Sadly Google Scholar is something I've argued that libraries don't have any competitive advantage in, because we are not paying customers, so Google does not owe us any answers, so learning about it is mostly trial and error.

Recently, I've been fortunate to be able to encounter and study Google Scholar from different angles at work including

a) Work on discovery services - lead me to study the differences and similarities of Google Scholar and Summon (also on systematic reviews). Also helping test and setting up the link resolver for Google Scholar.

b) Work on bibliometrics team  - lead me to study the strengths and
weakness of Google Scholar  and related services such as Google
Citations and Google Scholar Metrics vs Web of Science/Scopus as a
citation tool.

c) Most recently, I've was studying a little how entries in our
Institutional repositories were indexed and displayed in Google Scholar.

I would like to set out 8 points/features on Google Scholar that
surprised me when I learnt about them, I hope they are things you find
surprising or interesting as well.





1. Google does not include full text of articles but Google Scholar does



I always held the idea without considering it too deeply was that Google
had everything or mostly everything in Google Scholar but not
viceversa.



In the broad sense this is correct, search any journal article by title
and chances are you will see the same first entry going to the article
on the publisher site in both Google and Google Scholar.



This also reflects the way we present Google Scholar to students. We
imply that Google Scholar is a scope limited version of Google, and we
say if you want to use a Google service, at least use Google Scholar,
which does not include non-scholarly entries like Wikipedia, blog
entries unlike in Google.



All this is correct, except the main difference between Google Scholar
and Google, is while both allow you to find articles if you search by
title, only Google Scholar includes full-text in the index.



Why this happens is that the bots from Google Scholar are given the
rights by publishers like Elsevier, Sage to index the full-text of
paywalled articles on publisher owned platform domains, while Google
bots can only get at whatever is public, basically title and abstracts.
(I am unsure if the bots harvesting for Google and Google Scholar are
actually different, but the final result is the same).



I suppose some of you will be thinking this is obvious, but it wasn't to
me. Until librarians started to discuss a partnership Elsevier
announced with Google in Nov 2013.

Initially I was confused, didn't Google already index scholarly articles? But reading it carefully, you see it talked about full-text



The FAQ states this explicitly.

A sidenote, this partnership apparently works such that if you opt-in,
 your users using Google within your internal ip range will be able to
do full-text article matches (within your subscription). We didn't turn
it on here, so this is just speculation.





2.  Google Scholar has a very comprehensive index , great recall but poor precision for systematic reviews.



I am not a medical librarian, but I have had some interest in systematic
reviews because part of my portfolio includes Public Policy which is
starting to employ systematic reviews. Add my interest in Discovery
services meant I do have a small amount of interest in how discovery systems are similar and different to Google.

In particular "Google Scholar as replacement for systematic literature searches: good relative recall and precision are not enough" was a very enlightening paper that drilled deep into the capabilities of Google Scholar.



Without going into great detail (you can also read Is Summon alone good enough for systematic reviews? Some thoughts),
the paper points out that while the index of Google Scholar is
generally good enough to include almost all the papers eventually found
for systematic reviews (verified by searching for known titles) , the
lack of precision searching capabilities means one could never even find
the papers in the first place when actually doing a systematic review.



This is further worsened by the fact that Google Scholar, like Google actually only shows a maximum of 1,000 results anyway
so even if you were willing to spend hours on the task it would be a
futile effort if the number of results shown are above 1,000.





Why lack of precision searching? See next point.






3. Google Scholar has 256 character limit, lacking truncation and nesting of search subexpressions for more than 1 level.

Again Google Scholar as replacement for systematic literature searches: good relative recall and precision are not enough gets credit from me for the most detailed listing of strengths and weaknesses of Google Scholar.



Some librarians seem to sell Google and Google Scholar short.  Years
ago, I heard of librarians who in an effort to discourage Google use,
tell students Google doesn't do Boolean OR for example, which of course
isn't the case.



Google and Google Scholar does "implied AND" and of course you could always add "OR", As far as I can tell the undocumented Around function  doesn't work for Google Scholar though.



The main issue with Google Scholar that makes precision searching hard is



a) Lack of truncation

b) Unable to turn off autostemming - (Verbatim mode available only in Google, not sure if + operator works for Google Scholar, but it is depreciated for Google)



These are well known.



But I think lesser known is that there is a character limit for search
queries in Google Scholar of 256. Apparently if you go beyond, it will
silently drop the extra terms without warning you. Typical searches of
course won't go beyond 256 characters, but ultra precise systematic
review queries might of course.



Another thing that is is interesting to me is the paper I believe states
that nested boolean operators beyond one level will fail.







4. Google Scholar harvests at the article level, hence it is difficult for them to give coverage lists.



Think many people know that Google Scholar's index is constructed very
differently from databases in that it crawls page by page, pulling in
content it considers Scholarly at the article level.



This meant that multiple versions of the same article could be pulled
into Google Scholar and combined, so for example it could grab copies
from

• the main publisher site (eg Sage)
• an aggregator site or citation only site
• a Institutional repository 
• even semi-legal copies on author homepage, Researchgate, Academia.edu etc

All these versions are auto-combined.

I knew this, but only fairly recently it dawned on me this is the reason
for why Google Scholar does not have a coverage list of publication
with coverage dates.



Essentially they pull items at the article level, so there is no easy
way to succinctly summarise their coverage at the journal title.



Eg. Say there is a journal publisher that for whatever reason bars them
from indexing, they could still have some articles with varying coverage
and gaps by harvesting individual articles from institutional
repositories that may have some of the articles from the journal.



Even if they had the rights to harvest all the content from say Wiley,
the harvester might still miss out a few articles because of poor link
structure etc.



So they would in theory have coverage that could be extremely spotty,
with say an article or 2 in a certain issue, a full run for some years
etc.



As a sidenote, I can't help but compare this to Summon's stance that
they index at the journal title level rather than database level, except
Google Scholar indexes at a even lower level at the article level. 



Of course in theory Google Scholar could list the publisher domains that were indexed?



That said, I suspect based on some interviews by Anurag Acharya when
asked this question, fundamentally Google doesn't even think the
coverage data is useful to most searchers. I believe he notes, that even
though databases with large indexes have sources listed, it still
provides little guidance on what to use and most guides recommend just
searching all of them anyway.







Other semi-interesting things include

• Google Scholar tries to group different "manifestations" and all cites are to the this group
• Google Scholar uses automated parsers to try to figure out author
  and title, while may lead to issues of ghost authors, though this
  problem seems to be mostly resolved [paywall source]

5. You can't
use Site:institutionalrepositoryurl in Google Scholar to estimate number
of entries in your Institutional repository indexed in Google Scholar

Because of #4 , we knew it was unlikely everything in our institutional repository would be in Google Scholar.



I was naive and ignorant to think though one could estimate the amount
indexed in our institutional repository in Google scholar by using the
site operator.



I planned to do say Site:http://dash.harvard.edu in Google Scholar and look at the number of results. That should work by returning all results from the site right?

Does Harvard's institutional repository only have 4,000+ results in Google Scholar?





Even leaving aside the weasel word "about", sadly it does not work as you might expected.  In the official help files it
is stated this won't work and the best way to try to see if there is an
issue is to randomly sample entries from your institutional repository.



Why? Invisible institutional repositories: Addressing the low indexing ratios of IRs in Google Scholar has the answer.



First, we already know when there are multiple versions, Google Scholar
will select a primary document to link to. That is usually the one at
the publisher site. The remaining ones that are not primary will be
under the "All X versions".

According to Invisible institutional repositories: Addressing the low indexing ratios of IRs in Google Scholar., the site operator will only show up articles where the copy in your institutional repository is the primary document (the one that the title links to in Google Scholar, rather than those under "All X versions")







Perhaps one of the reasons I was mislead was I was reading studies like this calculating and comparing Google Scholar indexing ratios.

These studies, calculate a percentage based on number of results found
using the site:operator as a percentage of total entries in the
Institutional repository.



These studies are useful as a benchmark when studied across institutional repositories of course.



But I think assuming site:institututionalrepository shows only
primary documents, this also means the more unique content your
Institutional repository has (or for some reason the main publisher copy
isn't indexed or recognised as the main entry), the higher your Google Scholar indexing ratio will be.



Some institutional repositories contains tons of metadata without
full-text (obtained from Scopus etc), and these will lower the Google
Scholar indexing ratio, because they will be typically under "all x
variants" and will be invisible to Site:institutionalrepositoryurl



Other interesting points/implications

• Visibility of your institutional repository will be low if all you
  have is post/preprints of "normal" articles where publisher sites are
  indexed. 
• If the item is not free on the main publisher site and you have the
  full-text uploaded on your institutional repository Google scholar will
  show on the right a [Pdf ] from yourdomain

Seems to me this also implies most users from Google Scholar won't see
your fancy Institutional repository features but will at best be sent to
the full-text pdf directly, unless they bother to look under "All X
versions"

• If the item lacks an abstract Google Scholar can identify, it will tend to have a [Citation] tag. 

6. Google Scholar does not support OAI-PMH, and use Dublin Core tags (e.g., DC.title) as a last resort.

"Google Scholar supports Highwire Press tags (e.g., citation_title),
Eprints tags (e.g., eprints.title), BE Press tags (e.g.,
bepress_citation_title), and PRISM tags (e.g., prism.title). Use Dublin
Core tags (e.g., DC.title) as a last resort - they work poorly for
journal papers because Dublin Core doesn't have unambiguous fields for
journal title, volume, issue, and page numbers." - right from horse's mouth

Also this



Other interesting points

•  "New papers are normally added several times a week; however,
  updates of papers that are already included usually take 6-9 months.
  Updates of papers on very large websites may take several years, because
  to update a site, we need to recrawl it"
• To be indexed you need to have the full text OR (bibliometric data AND abstract)
• Files cannot be more than 5 MB, so books, dissertations should be uploaded to Google Books.

7. Despite the meme going on that Google and especially Google
Scholar (an even smaller almost microscopic team within Google) does not
respond to queries, they actually do respond at least for certain types
of queries.

We know the saying if you are not paying you are the product. Google and
Google Scholar have a reputation for having poor customer service.

But here's the point I missed, when libraries put on their hats as
institutional repository manager, their position with respect to Google
is different and you can get responses. 

In particular, there is a person at Google Darcy Dapra - Partner Manager, Google Scholar at Google, who is tasked to do outreach for library institutional repositories and publishers.



She has given talks to librarians managing institutional repositories as well as publishers in relation to indexing issues in Google Scholar.

Her response in my admittedly limited experience when asking questions
about institutional repository items presence in Google Scholar is
amazingly fast. 

8. Google Scholar Metrics - you can find H-index scores for items not ranked in the top 100 or 20.



Google Scholar Metrics which ranks publications is kinda comparable to
Journal Impact factor or other journal level metrics like SNIP,  SJR, eigenfactor  etc



First time I looked at it, I saw you could only pull out the top 100 ranked publications by languages (excluding English).



For English, at the main category and subcategories it will show the top 20 entries.

Top 20 ranked publications for Development Economics

I used to think that was all that was possible, if the publication was
not in the top 20 of each English Category or Subcategory, you couldn't
find a metric for the publication.



Apparently, not as you can search by journal titles.  Maybe obvious but I totally missed this.

As far as I can tell entries 7 & 8 above are not in the top 20 of
any category or sub-category yet there is a H5 index for this.



How is this useful? Though we would frown on improper use of journal
level metrics, I have often encountered users who want some metric, any
metric for a certain journal (presumably they published in it) and they
are not going to take "this isn't the way you use it for research
assessment" anyway.



When you exhaust all the usual suspects (JCR, SNIP, Scimago rank etc), you might want to give this a try.





 Other interesting points

• There doesn't seem to be a fixed period of updates (e.g Yearly)
• Some Subject repositories like  arXiv are ranked though at more granular levels eg arXiv Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci)
• Suggested reading

Conclusion



Given this is Google Scholar, where people figure things out by trial
and error and/or things are always in flux, it's almost certain I got
some things wrong.



Do let me know any errors you spot or if you have additional points that might be enlightening. 

Musings about librarianship: 8 surprising things I learnt about Google Scholar