Publish or Perish

Caveat emptor - Metrics - Articles using Publish or Perish - License agreement - Windows version - Linux version

Page link: http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm

Version: 2.5.2969 (16 February 2008)

Are you applying for tenure, promotion or a new job? Do you want to include evidence of the impact of your research? Is your work cited in journals which are not ISI listed? Then you might want to try Publish or Perish, designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage.

Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics:

• Total number of papers
• Total number of citations
• Average number of citations per paper
• Average number of citations per author
• Average number of papers per author
• Average number of citations per year
• Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
• Egghe's g-index
• The contemporary h-index
• The age-weighted citation rate
• Two variations of individual h-indices
• An analysis of the number of authors per paper.

The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard (for pasting into other applications) or saved to a variety of output formats (for future reference or further analysis). Publish or Perish includes a detailed help file with search tips and additional information about the citation metrics. Anne-Wil Harzing welcomes user feedback to help her improve the program.

Caveat emptor

Although for reasons discussed in detail in Google Scholar - a new data source for citation analysis the use of Google Scholar generally provides a higher citation count than ISI, this might not be true for all fields of studies.

• The social sciences, arts and humanities, and engineering in particular seem to benefit from Google Scholar's better coverage of (citations in) books, conference proceedings and a wider range of journals.
• The Natural and Health Sciences are generally well covered in ISI and hence Google Scholar might not always provide higher citation counts. In addition, for some disciplines in the Natural and Health Sciences Google Scholar's journal coverage seems to be patchy. This leads to citation counts in these areas that might even be much lower than those in ISI.

As a general rule of thumb, I would suggest that using Google Scholar might be most beneficial for three of the GS categories: Business, Administration, Finance & Economics; Engineering, Computer Science & Mathematics; Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities. Although broad comparative searches can be done for other disciplines, I would not encourage heavy reliance on Google Scholar for individual academics working in other areas without verifying results with either Scopus or WoS.

You might also want to read the following topics on this web site:

• Reflections on the h-index and Google Scholar - a new data source for citation analysis for a discussion of the validity, assumptions, and limitations of the underlying sources and methods used by Publish or Perish.
• Reflections on norms for the h-index and related indices for a discussion of norm scores
• Google Scholar: the democratization of citation analysis?
• A Google Scholar H-Index for Journals

Metrics

In addition to the various simple statistics (number of papers, number of citations, and others), Publish or Perish calculates the following citation metrics (see Citation metrics for more details):

Hirsch's h-index

Proposed by J.E. Hirsch in his paper An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output, arXiv:physics/0508025 v5 29 Sep 2005. It aims to provide a robust single-number metric of an academic's impact, combining quality with quantity.

Egghe's g-index

Proposed by Leo Egghe in his paper Theory and practice of the g-index, Scientometrics, Vol. 69, No 1 (2006), pp. 131-152. It aims to improve on the h-index by giving more weight to highly-cited articles.

Contemporary h-index

Proposed by Antonis Sidiropoulos, Dimitrios Katsaros, and Yannis Manolopoulos in their paper Generalized h-index for disclosing latent facts in citation networks, arXiv:cs.DL/0607066 v1 13 Jul 2006. It aims to improve on the h-index by giving more weight to recent articles, thus rewarding academics who maintain a steady level of activity.

Age-weighted citation rate (AWCR) and AW-index

The AWCR measures the average number of citations to an entire body of work, adjusted for the age of each individual paper. It was inspired by Bihui Jin's note The AR-index: complementing the h-index, ISSI Newsletter, 2007, 3(1), p. 6. The Publish or Perish implementation differs from Jin's definition in that we sum over all papers instead of only the h-core papers.

Individual h-index (2 variations)

The Individual h-index was proposed by Pablo D. Batista, Monica G. Campiteli, Osame Kinouchi, and Alexandre S. Martinez in their paper Is it possible to compare researchers with different scientific interests?, Scientometrics, Vol 68, No. 1 (2006), pp. 179-189. It divides the standard h-index by the average number of authors in the articles that contribute to the h-index, in order to reduce the effects of co-authorship.

Publish or Perish also implements an alternative individual h-index that takes a different approach: instead of dividing the total h-index, it first normalizes the number of citations for each paper by dividing the number of citations by the number of authors for that paper, then calculates the h-index of the normalized citation counts. This approach is much more fine-grained than Batista et al.'s; we believe that it more accurately accounts for any co-authorship effects that might be present and that it is a better approximation of the per-author impact, which is what the original h-index set out to provide.

Articles using Publish or Perish

• Norm scores for Australian Marketing professors are available in Research Performance of Senior Level Marketing Academics in the Australian Universities: An Exploratory Study Based on Citation Analysis, a paper by Mohammed A. Razzaque and Ian F. Wilkinson, presented at the Australia New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference (ANZMAC), University of Otago, New Zealand, Dec 1-3 2007.
• Citation Benchmarks for Articles Published by Australian Marketing Academics, a paper by Geoff Soutar, In M. Thyne, K. R. Deans and J. Gnoth (eds.), Conference Proceedings of the 2007 ANZMAC Conference. Dunedin: Department of Marketing, University of Otago, 3515-3520.
• An Exploratory Study of Information Systems Researcher Impact by Roger Clark compares Thomson's ISI database and Google Scholar in the context of citation analysis of leading Information Systems researchers; Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2008, Vol 22, pp. 1-32.
• What’s New in Finance? fortcoming in European Financial Management is a paper by Matti Keloharju that presents a list of the 300 most cited articles published in the area of Finance during the period 2000-2006.

Anne-Wil and Publish or Perish are also featured in The Australian's Higher Education supplement of 23 January 2008.

License agreement

Publish or Perish is provided courtesy of Harzing.com. It is free for personal non-profit use; please refer to the End User License Agreement for the full licensing terms and conditions.

Windows version

The Windows version of Publish or Perish is available for downloading by using the link below. The download package contains an installer for Microsoft Windows.

Publish or Perish installer for Windows (2.5.2969 - 16 February 2008 - 317 KB)

• What's new?
• Online help file (included with the download)

The Windows version of Publish or Perish has the following system requirements:

• Windows 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista, including x64 and Server editions.
• Some memory (enough to run the operating system, not much more).
• Some hard disk space (ditto).
• An Internet connection.

Older Windows versions
If you use an older Windows version (Windows 95, 98, or Me) you can still use Publish or Perish v1.9.

Linux version

The native Linux version of Publish or Perish is based on the GTK+ 2 libraries. It currently consists of a single executable that has Publish or Perish v1.9 functionality (all look-ups and metrics, but no multi-query center). To install it, download the gzipped tar ball below and unpack it into the bin directory of your choosing (typically /usr/local/bin):

Publish or Perish executable for Linux (v1.9 - 28 April 2007 - 44 KB)

The Linux version of Publish or Perish has been tested on Ubuntu 6.10 and 7.04. It should run on other modern Linux distributions and possibly on FreeBSD as well (using its Linux compatibility libraries), but we have not tested this yet.

The Linux version of Publish or Perish has the following requirements:

• Recent Linux kernel (we have only tested 2.6.x kernels; it is possible that 2.4.x and earlier might also work)
• Recent GTK+ 2.x libraries (we have tested 2.10 and 2.12; earlier ones might also work)
• Recent cURL package (we used 7.16.x); see the cURL download page
• Recent libcurl shared library (we used 7.16.x); see the cURL download page

Note: There is currently no help file for the native Linux version. Please use the web-based documentation instead.

Alternatively, you can also run the Windows version of Publish or Perish under the Wine compatibility layer. We have verified that Publish or Perish operates correctly with the current version of Wine (0.9.32 as of this writing). We have put together a separate Publish or Perish on Wine web page that describes how to install and use Wine and Publish or Perish on your Linux system. Please use the instructions on that page to get started.