Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. It allows you to locate specialized information, as well as keep track of your publications and all citations to your articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics from all the data stored in your profile
Setting up your Profile
- Go to Google Scholar and click on “Sign in” with your Google account, or create one if you don't already have one.
- Once on the Google Scholar homepage, click on “My profile”.
- Fill in the form with your personal information: name, affiliation, e-mail, areas of interest... Click on “Next”.
- Select the publications you have authored and click on the arrow that appears in the upper right-hand corner. If this doesn’t bring your articles up, click on "Search articles" to do a regular Google Scholar search, and then add your articles one at a time. Feel free to do as many searches as you like.
- Select the profile configuration options according to your preferences and click on "Done".
Why Make My Google Scholar Profile Public?
- To obtain greater visibility, both personal and institutional.
- It also means that you will receive an email whenever someone quotes one of your publications (it will create alerts).
Things to Bear in Mind vis-à-vis Google Scholar
- It will be the first thing someone sees when they google your name.
- It includes: journal and conference papers, theses and dissertations, academic books, pre-prints, abstracts, technical reports and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research.
- It does a better job of capturing books and non-English language materials than most traditional databases.
- You can choose to have your list of articles updated automatically, review the updates yourself, or manually update your articles at any time.
- It crawls the entire web so if you have a paper with a DOI on your website, it should be indexed.
- Citation counts in Google Scholar tend to be over-inflated. There have been concerns about the quality of the citations that are counted as they may not originate from peer-reviewed literature.
- New records are added throughout the month.
- Updates to existing records could take between six months and a year.
