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Getting Better Search Results with Google Scholar: Google Scholar metrics for faculty

Google Scholar is a convenient search tool but it has limitations. Learn how to get the best results from your searches.

Using Google Scholar to Build Metrics

To use Google Scholar to provide yourself (and others) with some measures of your publications:

  1. Sign up for a Google account (or use the one you have).
  2. See what gets drawn into your profile. You may put the references for your works into your profile, but Google Scholar may not generate metrics for them.
  3. Check the citations to your works developed by Google Scholar-- many citations are incomplete or incorrectly attributed.
  4. Remember that h-index and all the other metrics are only mechanical measures or algorithms representing one way of judging the worth of publications.
  5. If you are satisfied with your profile, make it public.
  6. Eigenfactors and impact factors belong to journals, not individual articles or authors.

Check your profile to make sure what's there is yours.

Check to be sure that what Google puts in your profile is yours. Google Scholar added the top article to this profile. There is a last name and first initial in common, but the person whose profile it is is not the author or an author of the work.  The metrics are skewed as a result.