Assessing citations with Google Scholar: A new feature.

Sir,

Google Scholar is a well-known search engine, and allowed users to freely access scholarly articles. It indexes the full text of scholarly papers available in suitable publishing formats and disciplines.[1] Using Google Scholar, we can find academic contents such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and technical reports from broad areas of research. Further, with the aid of Google Scholar, we can also search for many articles of unknown academic publishers, professional societies, and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.[2] It is happy to learn that an Indian Anurag Acharya, a principal engineer, created Google Scholar to search academic papers in the year 2004.[3]

Many of us prefer using Google Scholar for looking articles required for performing research, but often we do not use its powerful features for identifying required articles.[4] Advanced search options eases and narrows our search and retrieves exactly whatever we are looking for. In this commentary, I am listing the useful resources available for using advanced features [http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search][5] available in Google Scholar. Table 1 provides a comprehensive list of resources available related to Google Scholar. It is worth visiting and learning fully about using Google Scholar.

Table 1

List of resources related to advanced search options with Google Scholar

A NEW FEATURE IN GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Citation metrics are available with subscribed tools such as SCOPUS, Eigenfactor, Thomson ISI, etc. It requires subscription to access those, and many of the new journals have not been included in these databases. Google Scholar crawls the web and identifies almost every scholarly article available in suitable publishing formats in the web. It has recently added a feature titled “Google Citations open for all”. This feature has many useful tools for an author to have his/her own collection of articles as public web page. The authors of specific areas can identify their specialities and list themselves. It has many features such as authors can create a list of their published papers and the listed citation is regularly updated whenever cited. One can easily export their own listed papers in many reference formats such as BiBTEX, Refman, Endnote, etc. In continuation to my previous writing related to the research tool Zotero,[6] I would like to inform the authors about the new feature available in Google Scholar related to citation analysis. It is worth visiting the page.

Simple steps: Visit http://scholar.google.com [Figure 1] and click my citations. Once logged in, you can add your papers by searching through Google Scholar search, click to save and make a list of own articles. A public page identified in a suitable specialization can also be created along with the list of published papers with number of citations [Figure 2].

Figure 1

Click “My Citations” on top left page of Google Scholar

Figure 2

A public page along with citations for published papers