Author impact analysis

The Author impact tab allows you to perform a quick analysis of the impact of an author's publications. This tab contains the minimum parameters that are necessary to look up an author's publications on Google Scholar. Publish or Perish uses these parameters to perform a Google Scholar query, which is then analyzed and converted to a number of statistics. The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard (for pasting in other applications) or saved to a text file (for future reference or further analysis).

• For an explanation of the statistics, see the introduction About Publish or Perish.
• See Accuracy of the results for circumstances that make the citations analysis less accurate.
• See More about citation analysis for an in-depth discussion of the validity, assumptions, and limitations of the underlying sources and methods used by Publish or Perish.
• See General search if you want to perform a search with more parameters than available on the Author impact tab.

How to perform an Author impact analysis

To perform a basic impact analysis:

1. Start Publish or Perish;
2. Enter the author's name in the Author's name field;
3. Click Lookup or press the Enter button.

The program will now contact Google Scholar to obtain the citations, process the list, and calculate the statistics, which are then displayed in the Impact summary field. The full list of results is also available for inspection or modifications.

Refining your analysis

In many cases, the list of results will contain works of authors that are not the intended author. You can refine the citation search and analysis with one or more of the following methods.

If you change the any of the fields (except the selections in the Results list) , you must resubmit the search by clicking Lookup again.

Include an author's initials

You can use a more detailed author's name, for example by including initials. A search for Harzing can be refined by changing it to A Harzing (or Harzing A, which has the same effect); likewise, you can use CT Kulik instead of Kulik if you know that the author usually publishes with those two initials. Be careful, though: authors are not always consistent in the initials that they use, and references to their articles may use other combinations or formats still.

Tip: Name matching is case-insensitive; harzing, Harzing, and HARZING all match the same works.

Quoting the author's name

By default, Google Scholar matches the name and initials anywhere in the list of authors, so CT Kulik would also be matched by P Kulik, CT Williamson. To match an author's initials only in combination with her or his own surname, use "quotes" around the author's name: "CT Kulik" will not match P Kulik, CT Williamson, but it will match CT Kulik and CTM Kulik, or any other name that contains both CT and Kulik.

Search for multiple authors

To search for articles co-written by specific authors, enter all their names in the Author's name field: "C Kulik" "M Ambrose" will return only articles that have both authors in their author list.

You can use the logical operators AND and OR in the field: "C Kulik" AND "M Ambrose" returns only co-authored articles (this is also the default behavior if you do not use AND or OR); "C Kulik" OR "M Ambrose" returns articles authored by C Kulik and M Ambrose separately (although possibly with others), or co-authored by both.

Excluding certain authors

To exclude certain author names, enter them in the Exclude these names field. For example, to exclude CLC Kulik from the earlier example, enter "CLC Kulik" in the Exclude these names field. You can enter more than one exclusion in Exclude these names: "CL Kulik" "CLC Kulik" would exclude both these combinations from the search.

Restricting the years of publication

If you know that a certain author only published after (or before) a certain year, you can enter the start or end years in the Year of publication between ... and ... fields. You can also use these fields if you want to analyse the author's publications from a given period.

Restricting the subject areas

If you know the subject area in which the author usually publishes, you can restrict the search to those areas by checking the corresponding boxes. Please be careful, though: Google's subject classification is not always spot-on. For example, the following journals are classified under Social Sciences rather than Business: Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management, and The International Journal of Cross-cultural Management.

Include or exclude individual works

If the list of results is fairly limited, you can manually include or exclude citations from the analysis by checking or clearing the boxes in the Results list.

Tip: In contrast to the other refinements, changes in the Results list take effect immediately and are reflected in the Impact summary field. You do not have to resubmit your search.

Here are some shortcuts:

• The Select all button places check marks in all boxes;
• The Unselect all button clears all boxes;
• When you use the keyboard to travel up and down in the Results list, pressing the space bar toggles the check mark on and off on the selected line.

Step-by-step search strategy

I have found that the following search strategy is often very effective:

1. Search for the target academic’s name with his/her first initial and surname in quotes, e.g. "a harzing". Please note that Google Scholar matches the surname and initials anywhere in the initials+surname combination, so "C Kulik" would be matched by CT Kulik, CLC Kulik, but also by PC Kulik.
2. It is generally better to use fewer initials and then exclude the ones you don't want (see next point) instead of using more initials, because many citations (or authors) are sloppy with the initials they use. With too many initials in the Author's name field you run the risk of missing a substantial number of relevant articles.
3. To exclude certain names, enter them in the Exclude these names field. For example, to exclude CLC Kulik from the previous example, enter "CLC Kulik" in the Exclude these names field (and keep "C Kulik" in the Author's name field). You can enter more than one exclusion in Exclude these names: "CL Kulik" "CLC Kulik" would exclude both these combinations from the search.
4. Ensure you have ticked the relevant subject areas, but do not define these too narrow. For academics in Management for instance, it is usually safest to click both Business and Social Sciences.
5. If the result includes publications not published by the target academic, deselect those publications (remove the tick mark in the first column by clicking on it). If the list is long, it might be easier to deselect all publications first and then only select the relevant publications. Please note that any titles with less than 5 citations usually have very little or no impact on the h-index, but might influence the g-index. Hence, if you are faced with a very long list and are only interested in the h-index, you might consider deselecting all and only reviewing titles with 5 or more citations.
6. Selecting relevant publications might be easier by sorting the results by Cites, Authors, Title, Year, Publication, or Publisher. Sorting is done simply by clicking on the corresponding column heading.

Exporting the results

You can export the results as follows:

• Click Copy Results to copy the citation analysis to the Windows clipboard. You can then use the Paste command in most applications (including word processors and spreadsheets) to place the data in another document.
• Choose File > Save Results... from the main menu to save the citation analysis to a text file. On Windows 95, 98, and Me, this will be a plain text file; on Windows NT4, 2000, XP, and later it will be a UTF-8 encoded text file (which retains non-English characters more easily). Most modern word processors and other applications can deal with these.

In the first two cases, only the currently checked citations will be included; they will appear in the order in which they are shown on the screen. You can change the order by clicking on a column header (Cites, Authors, Title, Year, Publication, Publisher) in the Results list.

Important notes and tips

Important notes and tips
	You can cancel a citation lookup by clicking on the Cancel button or pressing the Esc key. However, it may be a few seconds before the program responds.
	The Impact summary field has a scroll bar on its right that you can use to see the remainder of the analysis results.
	The Results list can be sorted by clicking on a column header (Cites, Authors, Title, Year, Publication, Publisher).
	To see all the citing works for an item, double-click on that item in the Results list.
	Depending on the number of citations found and the speed of your Internet connection, the lookup process may take 2-60 seconds.
	The maximum number of referenced works returned by Google Scholar is a little less than 1000.
	The citation analysis is based on the results returned by Google Scholar. These are not always 100% accurate. See Accuracy of the results for some caveats.