Finding Scientific Articles in Google Scholar Database

Dr. Anne-Wil Harzing's Publish or Perish (PoP) software is an excellent tool that queries the Google Scholar database, analyzes the results and presents them in a novel and very useful manner. The software is available for free at http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm. After you have installed it check out 2-Minute Introduction and Frequently Asked Questions under the Help resources menu of PoP.

Publish or Perish (PoP) as a tool for academics

Using the Author Impact analysis tool, Publish or Perish is designed to empower individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage (see section What Publish or Perish is for on page http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm), e.g. when applying for tenure or promotion.

Publish or Perish (PoP) as a research tool

In the General citations feature of Publish or Perish the database is queried based on the search word(s) supplied. The results are presented in order of number of citations. The publication that has been cited most often is the first one listed. Click any column heading and you sort by that heading. A publication that is cited frequently is often considered a key publication, given the search criteria specified. Clicking on any one of the results gives a listing of all articles that have cited that particular publication, while the article itself is given at the top. Clicking on Cite (below an article) gives a proper citation you can copy and paste into e.g. a document. To get the maximum benefit of the citations feature, preferences should be set in Google Scholar.

Setting Preferences in Google Scholar

To find a publication listed by Google Scholar or to obtain a proper bibliographic citation for that publication Preferences should be set. Go to http://scholar.google.ca/scholar_preferences? and enter appropriate information under Library Links (e.g. Concordia) and Bibliography Manager (e.g. Refworks). This gives a Find-it @ Concordia link.Note that these setting may be lost when Cearing all browser data.

Last updated: Gerard J Gouw, 20 July 2016