As a scholar, it is most satisfying to know you have had an impact on the evolution of your field. This impact, measured often in citation counts, is critical for tenure and promotion, but should also be of interest in community-building and finding collaborators for future research. That’s where Google Scholar Citations comes in.

How It Works

Google Scholar Citations is an easy way to review your productivity and assess your impact on the field. I discovered just how easy when I set up my own profile. (Note: You do need a Google account)

To get started, I clicked on the Citations sign-up form on the Google Scholar Citations reference page, where I reviewed my name and added my affiliation, interest areas and email address. Continuing, I was brought to a page with groups of articles by some EAllen variation. All of the articles under EEAllen were mine, and the click of a button added them to my profile.

I did see that one very old article wasn’t included, so I went searching for it before adding it. I thought I’d have to add it manually since Google hadn’t originally found it, but when I clicked on Actions and Add, it was right there. Another click of a button and the old article was added to my profile as well. Another of the actions, export, will transform the publications into BibTeX or EndNote, RefMan or CSV. You can merge citations, delete them, and automatically update the list. It’s nice to sort them by year too.

And of course, your profile can be edited. I thought about editing my interest areas but for the time being, I’m ok with what’s there. Rounding out the page, I added my picture to the profile page.

As I write this, my profile is private, for my use and consumption, and not for others’ eyes. But when I finish it, I think I’ll publish it openly, so everyone can see the little bit of research and publishing I have done, most of it since I left my position as Assistant Librarian at SUNY Tech. I don’t claim to be a scholar, and I was genuinely surprised to see the number of citations to one article I wrote as a Librarian. Drilling down into those citations (by clicking on the number), I’ll be able to discover if they truly were citations, or just mentions in the References, and who was doing the citing, and how many cited them. Pretty cool.