Publish or Perish - citation software

 

Acknowledgement to Anne-Wil Harzing Harzing Research

 

Are you applying for tenure, promotion or a new job? Do you want to include evidence of the impact of your research? Is your work cited in journals which are not ISI listed? Then you might want to try Publish or Perish, designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage. Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics:

 

• Total number of papers
• Total number of citations
• Average number of citations per paper
• Average number of citations per author
• Average number of papers per author
• Average number of citations per year
• Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
• Egghe's g-index
• The contemporary h-index
• The age-weighted citation rate
• Two variations of individual h-indices
• An analysis of the number of authors per paper.

The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard (for pasting into other applications) or saved to a variety of output formatsdetailed help file with search tips and additional information about the citation metrics. Anne-Wil Harzing welcomes user feedback to help her improve the program. (for future reference or further analysis).

 

Please note: Although for reasons discussed in detail in Reflections on Google Scholar the use of Google Scholar generally provides a higher citation count than ISI, this might not be true for all fields of studies. The social sciences, arts and humanities, and engineering in particular seem to benefit from Google Scholar's better coverage of (citations in) books, conference proceedings and a wider range of journals. The Natural and Health Sciences are generally well covered in ISI and hence Google Scholar might not always provide higher citation counts. In addition, for some disciplines in the Natural and Health Sciences Google Scholar's journal coverage seems to be patchy. This leads to citation counts in these areas that might even be much lower than those in ISI. As a general rule of thumb, I would suggest that using Google Scholar might be most beneficial for three of the GS categories: Business, Administration, Finance & Economics; Engineering, Computer Science & Mathematics; Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities. Although broad comparative searches can be done for other disciplines, I would not encourage heavy reliance on Google Scholar for individual academics working in other areas without verifying results with either Scopus or WoS.

 

Metrics

In addition to the various simple statistics (number of papers, number of citations, and others), Publish or Perish calculates the following citation metrics (see Citation metrics for more details):

Hirsch's h-index

Proposed by J.E. Hirsch in his paper An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output, arXiv:physics/0508025 v5 29 Sep 2005. It aims to provide a robust single-number metric of an academic's impact, combining quality with quantity.

Egghe's g-index

Proposed by Leo Egghe in his paper Theory and practice of the g-index, Scientometrics, Vol. 69, No 1 (2006), pp. 131-152. It aims to improve on the h-index by giving more weight to highly-cited articles.

Contemporary h-index

Proposed by Antonis Sidiropoulos, Dimitrios Katsaros, and Yannis Manolopoulos in their paper Generalized h-index for disclosing latent facts in citation networks, arXiv:cs.DL/0607066 v1 13 Jul 2006. It aims to improve on the h-index by giving more weight to recent articles, thus rewarding academics who maintain a steady level of activity.

Age-weighted citation rate (AWCR) and AW-index

The AWCR measures the average number of citations to an entire body of work, adjusted for the age of each individual paper. It was inspired by Bihui Jin's note The AR-index: complementing the h-index, ISSI Newsletter, 2007, 3(1), p. 6. The Publish or Perish implementation differs from Jin's definition in that we sum over all papers instead of only the h-core papers.

Individual h-index (2 variations)

The Individual h-index was proposed by Pablo D. Batista, Monica G. Campiteli, Osame Kinouchi, and Alexandre S. Martinez in their paper Is it possible to compare researchers with different scientific interests?, Scientometrics, Vol 68, No. 1 (2006), pp. 179-189. It divides the standard h-index by the average number of authors in the articles that contribute to the h-index, in order to reduce the effects of co-authorship.

Publish or Perish also implements an alternative individual h-index that takes a different approach: instead of dividing the total h-index, it first normalizes the number of citations for each paper by dividing the number of citations by the number of authors for that paper, then calculates the h-index of the normalized citation counts. This approach is much more fine-grained than Batista et al.'s; we believe that it more accurately accounts for any co-authorship effects that might be present and that it is a better approximation of the per-author impact, which is what the original h-index set out to provide.

See also Reflections on the h-index and Reflections on Google Scholar for a discussion of the validity, assumptions, and limitations of the underlying sources and methods used by Publish or Perish. See Reflections on norms for the h-index and related indices for a discussion of norm scores.

 

License agreement

Publish or Perish is provided courtesy of Harzing.com. It is free for personal non-profit use; please refer to the End User License Agreement for the full licensing terms and conditions.