Research Impact Metrics: Citation Analysis

Google Scholar has both benefits and limitations when it comes to citation analysis. 

Benefits:

• It's free
• It's fast
• It will most likely offer a higher number of documents which have cited a work.
• It offers an almost unlimited universe of content. Whatever has been cited by another work on the web and can be collected by Google will be in Google Scholar.

Limitations:

• There is no standardization of author names so you may have to search multiple variations of a name to find works written by an individual. 
• Anything cited by another article, whether scholarly or not will be included in the times cited list.  This can include blog posts, syllabi or anything else mentioned in a scholarly article. 
• Every version of an article is included in search results so there are likely duplicate entries for the same article and the times cited count may also include duplicates. 
• Google Scholar provides only very basic citation analysis options compared with reports and tools available from Web of Science. 

The simplest option for analyzing citation counts in Google Scholar is to find the number of times an individual article has been cited by others. 

The order by which search results are arranged is difficult to determine but generally it appears that the times an article has been cited is given weight and those articles cited the most tend to appear toward the top of the list of results. 

In November, 2011, Google Scholar added a new option called Google Scholar Citations. Authors can use this service to compute citation metrics and track them over time. The same caveats that apply to citation searching in Google Scholar apply to Google Scholar Citations so check the information in the previous box to learn about those. 

To get started with Google Scholar Citations to create your own profile, go to Google Scholar and click on the My Ciations link.

Choose the articles or groups of articles you wish to track. (Google Scholar suggests articles for your profile, but also allows you to search and add articles). Later, you can edit or delete the articles in your profile or add more articles to your profile.

Add articles to your profile on an ongoing basis, either by having Google Scholar automatically update your profile, or you can first review and confirm updates.

Warning: Google Scholar frequently confuses authors with similar names so you may get incorrect results if you choose to have Google automatically add citations to your profile. Make sure to review your profile periodically and delete citations inappropriately assigned to your name. 

It is up to each individual researcher to set up his or her own profile within Google Scholar. Because of this, not every author listed in Google Scholar will have a profile you can view. There are 2 ways to find an author's profile. 

1. Search by author name. If this author has created a profile a link to it will appear at the top of the list of results.
   
   
    
2. Perform a keyword search and if you find a citation with an author name underlined you will be able to click on that author name to view that author's profile within Google Scholar. 
   
   

Citations included in an author profile are sorted so that the most cited research appears at the top of the list. Articles can be re-sorted by title or date published by clicking on the appropriate column heading.

If an author has not created a citation profile there is no option within Google Scholar to find the most cited article authored by a specific person.