Surveying Russell Group University Use of Google Scholar Citations

Measuring Take-up of Google Scholar Citations

A recent post gave some “Thoughts on Google Scholar Citations“. I concluded by suggesting that researchers could find it useful to claim their account on Google Scholar Citations and  ensure that the details of their papers are accurate but speculated on whether there would be barriers to researchers doing this. In order to investigate the level of usage of Google Scholar Citations in the UK higher education sector a survey of its usage across the twenty Russell Group Universities has been carried out and the findings published in this post. The institution’s name, as listed in the first column, was used as a search term.  The number of entries gives the current number of researchers found, with a link provided to the current final page of results.  In addition in order to investigate whether the service is being used by new researchers, who are likely to have a low number of citations or well-established researchers with large numbers of citations, a summary of the top three researchers having the largest numbers of citations is give, with links to the researchers profile together with details of the numbers of citations for the three researchers having the lowest numbers of citations. The results are given in the following table.  The survey was carried out on Tuesday 22 November 2011

Institution	Nos. of entries	Highest Citations	Lowest Citations
University of Birmingham	33 *	(18,989)* – 5,817 –  5,770 – 4,243	13 – 15 – 16
University of Bristol	40	21,761 –  9,223  –   8,271	0  –  0  –  6
University of Cambridge	73	46,121 – 18,272 –  17,806	0  –  0  –  0
Cardiff University	20	6,665 –   6,142  –   3,823	0  –  0  –  1
University of Edinburgh	68	13,844 – 12,158  –   9,082	0  –  0  –  0
University of Glasgow	64	13,228 – 11,718  –   5,773	0  –  0  –  1
Imperial College	71	31,261 –   9,630  –   9,303	0  –  4  –  4
Kings College London	23	6,052  – 6,030  –    4,513	0  –  0  –  0
University of Leeds	30	12,686 –  6,780  –    6,732	0  –  1  –  4
University of Liverpool	15	34,499 – 20,014  –  14,717	1  –  1  –  8
London School of Economics	17	14,191 –  9,222  –    6,303	0  –  0  –  0
University of Manchester	73	19,572 – 18,155 –  13,708	1  –  1  –  2
Newcastle University	44 *	11,185 – 10,679  –   3,111	0  –  1  –  4
University of Nottingham	40	11,506 –   9,084  –   5,661	0  –  0  –  0
University of Oxford	109	25,363 – 24,311 –  16,639	0  –  0  –  0
Queen’s University Belfast	15	2,357  –  1,913  –   1,667	1 – 24 – 37
University of Sheffield	32	5,735  –  3,318  –   2,980	0  –  1 –   1
University of Southampton	39	42,197  –  9,009  –  4,708	0  –  0  –  4
University College London	145	31,440 – 30,842 –  20,058	0  –  0  –  0
University of Warwick	23	3,194 –  2,923  –   1,850	0  –  0  –  0
Total	974 * **

* It was noted that the first entry for a search for the University of Birmingham referred to Mary Vignolo Wheatley from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The numbers of Google Scholar Citation entries is therefore overstated for the University of Birmingham and potentially for the other institutions which are listed. ** I was informed after publication of this post that of the 44 citations quoted for Newcastle, 11 are actually for the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. Such errors could creep in for other institutions for which there are name clashes (e.g. York University and New York University). This highlights the need for globally unique institutional identifiers – but such discussions are outs the scope of this post. It was also noticed that the third entry for the University of Cambridge referred to Alan Turing, the English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist who, as described in Wikipedia, lived from 1912-1954.  Unsurprisingly his Google Scholar Citation entry states that his email address has not been verified!

Discussion

In a recent discussion about Google Scholar Citations I have been told about the difficulties in claiming authorship of papers after one has left one’s host institution and no longer has an institutional email address.  A second discussion I heard from one person who claimed his Google Scholar  account shortly before leaving his host institution who provided an alternative email account which could be used one his institutional email account had been deleted. The first example highlights a potential difficulty in asserting authorship of papers after one has left the host institution and the second example describes one way in which such potential problems can be addressed.  It would therefore appear sensible for researchers to claim a Google Scholar account while they are in a position to associate it with papers published in their host institution. An interesting issue, therefore, will be who should take responsibility for advising researchers on best practices for using services such as Google Scholar Citations.  Should the library include such advice in its training courses for new researchers?

Conclusions

A recent post by Wouter Gerritsma, subject librarian and bibliometrician at Wageningen UR Library described “How Google Scholar Citations passes the competition left and right“. Wouter’s post concluded:

Google Scholar is only about five years old. Give them another five years and they will have changed the market for abstracting and indexing database totally. If only 20 percent of all scientists make their publication lists correct (also editing of the references which can be done to improve the mistakes Google has made) even without making them publically available, Google sits on a treasure trove of high quality metadata. Really interesting to see how this story will develop.

It will be interesting to see how this story develops.  And as the launch of Google Scholar Citations was only announced a week ago today, we do have an opportunity to observe its take-up within our institutions from its early days.  Monitoring the take-up of the service, the approaches taken in managing the information and understanding difficulties in such management activities will be valuable not only in developing plans for use with other services in this space. Hmm, I wonder if Google Scholar Citations has APIs which will enable such monitoring approaches to be implemented in a scalable way?