Accuracy: Merge duplicates

Publish or Perish tutorial

Anne-Wil Harzing - Sat 6 Feb 2016 16:10 (updated Thu 2 Jun 2022 10:50)

Note: This tutorial was originally written for Publish or Perish version 4 and all screenshots come from this version. However, the information as such is also applicable for later versions of Publish or Perish.

See also the blogpost: How to merge “stray citation" records?

For most authors you will notice duplicate or near-duplicate articles in the Publish or Perish Results list. These duplicates may be due to one or more of the following:

• Sloppy referencing. Not all references to an author's work are accurate. Small differences in the names of the authors, the article's title, or its source may cause the same article to appear more than once.
• Google Scholar or Microsoft Academic parsing the publication from more than one source.

Non standard publications have more duplicates

The former will happen more often with publications that are of a “non-standard” format, such as books, book chapters, conference papers, and software as – unlike journal articles – there is no universally agreed way to reference them. Publish or Perish itself for instance is referenced in more than thirty different ways.

A white paper on my web-site has three different records.

Effect of duplicates on citation analysis

The effect on the citation analysis is that:

• The total number of articles may come out higher than the actual number, because duplicates are counted separately.
• The citations per paper may come out lower, for the same reason.
• The h-index and g-index may come out differently, because citations are spread over the duplicates.

Merge duplicates by simple drag and drop

Since Version 3.0 of Publish or Perish, duplicates can be merged into the master record, simply by dragging the stray citation onto the master record. The merged record of the white paper above is shown in the screenshot below.

Support Publish or Perish

The development of the Publish or Perish software is a volunteering effort that has been ongoing since 2006. Download and use of Publish or Perish is and will remain free (gratis), but your support toward the costs of hosting, bandwidth, and software development are appreciated. Your support helps further development of Publish or Perish for new data sources and additional features.

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PS: If you are using Publish or Perish on a regular basis, please take 5 minutes to provide me with some feedback.