Research Support

When undertaking a Citation Analysis be aware of the following:

• Citation databases index only a limited number of peer-reviewed journal titles
• They exclude many books and conference proceedings
• Many articles are published in a language other than English
• It is important to choose a citation tool that is relevant to your discipline e.g. the Web of Science includes over 8,500 journals in its Science Citation Index but only 1,700 journals in its Arts and Humanities Citation Index
• It can be difficult to differentiate between two authors who share the same surname and first name or first initial 

Publish or Perish is a citation analysis tool which uses Google Scholar citation data. It is free for personal non-profit use and can be installed from http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm.

Google Scholar covers more books, theses, conference papers, technical reports and other academic publications than either Web of Science or Scopus. However, coverage in Google Scholar is uncontrolled and there is no definitive list of all publications that are included.

Citation analysis results from Publish or Perish favour those who have personally made their articles available online, for example through institutional or subject repositories. A new feature of Publish or Perish is that you can change the source data and use Microsoft Academic Search citation data instead of Google Scholar data.