Increasing the visibility of your Publications

Whether you have one or more publications, setting up a Google Scholar Citation Profile is a straightforward way of keeping track of your citations and is free of charge. I set up a profile last summer. It was very quick and easy to do, taking about fifteen minutes in total. The page has very clear instructions.

The first step is a prompt that asks for name, discipline, and institutional email. I was then asked to verify a list of my publications, which the system had retrieved. I added a photo and my profile, with list of publications, was complete. Clicking on an individual article brings up detailed information for that article, including the number of citations per year, the abstract and fulltext (if available) and full bibliographic details. The Export button allows references to be imported to various bibliographic management software packages – endnote, Reference Manager and BibTex.

 I have opted to view updates, so when Google Scholar finds a new publication of mine, it asks me to view it and verify that is my publication. The reason I’m doing this is to ensure the data for my profile is accurate. I’m e-mailed each time a publication of mine is cited and I can see what article/publication I have been cited in. Citation data and metrics are updated automatically as Google Scholar finds new citations to my work. I’ve made my profile public, so it appears in Google Scholar results when people search for my name. In addition to giving total citations for individual articles, the system also gives a h-score (developed by Hirsh in 2005).  I’ve a h-index of 5 which means that 5 of my papers have been cited at least 5 times. The system also includes an i-10 index (the number of my publications with at least ten citations). Data from Google Scholar is used by Publish or Perish to analyse academic citations.  This software programe is also available free of charge.