December 7, 2012, by Graham Kendall

Google Scholar: Stand on the Shoulder of Giants

This is part of an irregular series as to how you might raise your research profile. These articles are all filed under the category of Research Profile in this blog.

Google Scholar has been around for a few years and, in some senses, it performs the same job that citeseer does. That is, it searches the internet for scientific papers, and enables users to search for them and download them. As a resource for academics both services are very valuable, although you have to be a little careful, as you sometimes are not sure what version of the paper you are looking at or, indeed, if the paper has been subject to the peer review process that we would normally expect. Having said that, I have noticed an improvement over recent years and the quality of the information seems to have significantly improved.

But, Google Scholar, goes way beyond just providing search capabilities. As long as you have a Google account, and most people do I would guess, then you can register all your papers, calculate your H-index etc.

Once you have registered yourself, and provided information on your papers, you can access lots of information about yourself, and your co-authors. Just ,as one small example, here is a screen shot of part of my home page.

As you can see, it provides headline news of citations, h-index etc.

Google Scholar also gives you a public profile URL (mine is here) so that others can see your data. Perhaps more importantly, it means that Google knows about you and, although you might not like the thought of Google holding even more data about you, it does mean that users carrying out searches will have easier access to your information.

We would strongly recommend that you set up a Google account AND populate it with your papers. You should also mention this on your home page, so that others can easily find the information.

You might also want to post a link to your Google Home Page as a response to this post, just to further increase your online profile.

In future posts we might discuss some other aspects of Google Scholar, as well as other ways that you can increase the impact and visibility of your scientific online profile. We’d also welcome any ideas you have as to how your online presence can be improved.

 

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