Citation Analysis: 2. Google Scholar

This section covers the use of Google Scholar for citation counts and identifies other applications that can be used with the resulting citation counts to provide additional functionality and information. The material presented here is divided into the following categories:

• Citation Searching in Google Scholar
• Software & Programs for Google Scholar Citation Data

The citation information in Google Scholar is extracted from the scholarly journal articles within the Scholar database and from the U.S. patents contained in the Google Patents database.   Users have the option to eliminate the patents as the source of citation data and/or the option to include citations from legal journals and opinions from the federal and state courts. If a publication has been cited by these sources, it will contain a "Cited By Link" in its entry; clicking on that link will display the citing journal articles and patents (and the court opinions, if selected)

  How to Find Citation Counts via Google Scholar and "Who is Citing Whom"

1. Go to Google Scholar.
2. Select Advanced Scholar Search (link to right of search button).
3. Enter the appropriate search terms for the item under study.  Enter just enough information to find what you need - do not fill in the complete search form.    
4. Click on the Search Scholar button.
5. Locate the correct article in the search results list.
6. If the article was cited by others, you will see a "Cited by" link at the bottom of the record. Click this link to view who has cited this item. For more information about searching see Google Scholar's Help pages.

Be aware:

• Google Scholar does not index all scholarly articles; therefore, some articles citing the item under study may not be counted.
• Author names can be tricky to search and the results can vary greatly depending on how the name is entered; we recommend searching only the author's last name and combining that with the main title in quotations.
• Variants in how the item is cited can result in more than one entry for the item under study.
• The term "citation" in brackets [CITATION] at the beginning of an entry, indicates that the full text of the item is not accessible through Google Scholar. To see the full text of the item, use the Find Books and More  (for books) or Full Text Journals By Title (for articles), as appropriate,to find the item.

Google Scholar Citations
Google Scholar Citations allows authors to keep track of citations to their articles, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics (the h-index, i10-index, and the total number of citations for both All and Recent citations) by creating an author profile in which they identify all their articles for Google Scholar to track on an ongoing basis. 

Google Scholar Universal Gadget Citation Counter
You can add this gadget to your iGoogle page. The gadget gives the total citation count, the number of cited publications, and the H-index for an author.

Publish or Perish (PoP)
PoP is downloadable software providing enhanced analysis of Google Scholar citation data.  For more information and access to the software, see Publish or Perish on the Harzing.com website.

CIDS (Citation Impact Discerning Self-citations)
CIDS will analyze publications for self-citation data; this includes the h- and g-indexes calculated both with all cites and then without self-cites.  The service is free; however, limitations are many.   According to the FAQ page, only one search per email is allowed.  There is also a limit of 200 items (in the tutorial, it says 500 items) for the analysis.  The analysis takes about 1 minute per item to calculate.