The Advanced Scholar Search in Google Scholar has the option to search by Author. You can enter the authors name behind Return articles authored by. This is often not very specific, it's hard to limit the results for a specific author.
However, there is software available, based on Google Scholar data, which offers more options for author searches: Publish or Perish. This software can also compute metrics, like the H-index, based on Google Scholar.
Another option to search for particular authors is to use the Google Scholar Citations profiles of these authors. Authors have to create and update this profile themselves, so not every researcher is available in Google Scholar like this.
In this part of the course we cover:
Publish or Perish (PoP) is a free software program, which uses data from Google Scholar (among others) to retrieve and analyze academic citations. You can download PoP from the website of Anne-Wil Harzing, professor in International Management at the Middlesex University, London and the creator of PoP: https://www.harzing.com/pop.htm.
Want to know more? Look at this presentation of Anne-Wil Harzing.
In this course we will cover some of the basics of PoP, in the Publish or Perish Book and the Publish or Perish Tutorial you can find more details.
After downloading and installing the PoP software on your computer you can search for publications of an author in Google Scholar.
To create a new search, click Google Scholar. Enter the name of the author behind Authors (initials last name, for example A Bredenoord). Click the button Search to start the search.
The results consist of the list of publications, including the number of citations received, and the citation metrics, based on the list of publications.
Click on the picture to enlarge it
In most cases you’ll have to narrow down the search results before you can use the citation metrics, because publications of other researchers can be in the list.
Please note: Google Scholar allows a maximum of 1000 publications. When there are more results, you’ll see an error message in Publish or Perish. You can narrow your search for example by choosing specific publication years.
When you know that the author you are looking for has a Google Scholar Profile, you can also search for a profile. Select Google Scholar Profile in the start screen and enter the name and optionally the affiliation of the author you are looking for.
In the Citation Metrics box you’ll see the following citation metrics:
You can export these metrics to Excel:
You can also export the list of results: choose Results for Excel with Header.
In the search results in Google Scholar, author names are underlined when the author has a Google Scholar Citations profile.
The profile shows the publications added by the researcher to his or her profile and the citations to these publications within Google Scholar.
When you click a title in the profile, you can see more information about the publication (for example the abstract), and the citation graph for that publication.
The Google Scholar Citations profile shows three metrics, based on all publications added to the profile and all citations for these publications and based on the citations received in the last 5 year:
Please note: this is the disclaimer Google Scholar used to have on every page: "Dates and citation counts are estimated and are determined automatically by a computer program".