Google Scholar Opens Up Its Citations

Anyone can now track his or her citations via Google Scholar. The free citation service is “a simple way for authors to compute their citation metrics and track them over time,” the company said in an announcement yesterday on the Google Scholar blog. Google announced a limited-release test of the service in July.

Google Scholar automatically sorts articles into groups. Authors can go through those, identify which articles are indeed theirs, and edit the list. Google Scholars collects citations for each author and graphs them over time to calculate different metrics: “the widely used h-index; the i-10 index, which is simply the number of articles with at least ten citations; and, of course, the total number of citations to your articles,” the blog post says. “Each metric is computed over all citations and also over citations in articles published in the last five years.”

The citation metrics update automatically over time, according to Google Scholar. Scholars can manually edit their entries, “adding missing articles, fixing bibliographic errors, and merging duplicate entries.” Users can also list co-authors and search for other researchers by name, affiliation, or research area. Authors can opt to have their profiles made public, too. “This will make it easier for your colleagues worldwide to follow your work,” Google Scholar says.

It looks as though Microsoft Academic has also ramped up its Academic Search offerings in recent months.

Authors, do you use these services? How useful are they likely to be?