In addition to providing a academic search platform, Google Scholar allows you to showcase your papers and the citations they’ve received. Google Scholar also calculates a platform-dependent h-index, which many researchers love to track (for better or for worse).
In today’s challenge, we’re going to get you to use Google Scholar, so you can up your scholarly SEO (search engine optimization, aka “googleability”), more easily share your publications with new readers, and discover new citations to your work.
Head to scholar.google.com and click the “My Profile” link at the top of the page to get your account setup started. You can follow these step-by-step instructions if you need a hand (in particular, don't forget Step 3: Make your profile public!)
Adapted under a CC-BY 4.0 license from the The 30-Day Impact Challenge: The Ultimate Guide to Raising the Profile of Your Research eBook published by Impactstory.org and authored by Stacy Konkiel, and the Duquesne University 5-Day Impact Challenge.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Google has likely already been indexing your work for some time now as part of their mission as a scholarly search engine. However, keep in mind that Google Scholar does not index everything.
Google Scholar will provide you with a list of publications they think belong to you. You’ll need to read through the list of publications that it suggests as yours and select which ones you want to add to your profile.
Beware--if you have a common name, it’s likely there’s some publications in this list that don’t belong to you. And there’s also possibly content that you don’t want on your profile because it’s not a scholarly article, or is not representative of your current research path, and so on.
Your profile is now almost complete! Two more steps: add a photo by clicking the “+” icon in the photo box on your profile homepage, and set your private profile to “Public.”
Your profile is private if you’ve just created it. Change your profile visibility by clicking the link to "Make it public" under your name and title. You can also make your profile public by clicking the Edit button and selecting the box next to the words "Make my profile public."
Adding co-authors is a good way to let others know you’re now on Google Scholar. However, you can only add co-authors who have already created their own Google Scholar profiles. Google Scholar tries to find authors who have user profiles and list them for you. Thus, if you don’t see co-authors, it’s likely they don’t have Google Scholar user profiles.
That’s it! Now you’ve got a Google Scholar profile that helps you track when your work has been cited both in the peer-reviewed literature and, and is yet another scholarly landing page that’ll connect others with your publications. The best part? Google Scholar is pretty good at automatically adding new stuff to your profile, meaning you won’t have to do a lot of work to maintain it.
You might have articles that Google Scholar didn’t automatically add to your profile. If that’s the case, you’ll need to add it manually.
Thanks to Google Scholar Profiles’ “auto add” functionality, your Profile might include some articles you didn’t author.
If that’s the case, you can remove them in one of two ways:
If you want to prevent incorrect articles from appearing on your profile in the first place, you can change your Profile settings to require Google Scholar to email you for approval before adding anything. To make this change:
Dirty data in the form of incorrect publications isn’t the only limitation of Google Scholar you should be aware of. The quality of Google Scholar citations has also been questioned, because they’re different from what scholars have traditionally considered to be a citation worth counting: a citation in the peer-reviewed literature.
Google Scholar counts citations from pretty much anywhere they can find them. That means their citation count may include citations from online undergraduate papers, conference slides, and similar sources. Because of this, Google scholar citation counts are much higher than those from competitors like Scopus and Web of Science.
That can be a good thing. But it can also be argued that it’s “inflating” citation counts. It also makes Google Scholar’s citation counts quite susceptible to gaming techniques like using fake publications to fraudulently raise the numbers.
That said, the benefits of the platform outweigh the downsides for many.