Friday, May 10, 2013

My Citations

I recently discovered the "My Citations" feature on Google Scholar.  It is kind of neat.  You set up a profile with a list of your papers and then Google Scholar finds, counts and lists many of papers which have cited each of your papers.  Listing my papers was easy as Google had already grouped most of them together and I just had to add the whole group and then delete a few interlopers (you would think Google would realize a paper published in the 1700s didn't belong with the others even if it was also written by James Shearer).  In order to make your profile public (so it shows up when you search Google Scholar for your name) you need a verified email address at an academic institution.  This was a bit of a problem for me as I don't have a current academic affiliation.  But then I figured out as a MIT graduate I could set up an email address at alum.mit.edu which would just forward email to my personal account.  After I did this (and waited a day for it to take effect) I was able to use it to pass Google's verification and make my profile public.

When I was at IBM I tried for a while (until I lost interest) to keep track (via Science Citation Index) of papers citing mine.  This is much easier.  And Google Scholar seems to be pretty good at tracking down free online versions of published papers.  It is interesting to see that the number of people citing my papers each year has been trending upward although I haven't been producing much in the way of new papers for a long time.  However I suspect this is mostly because the number of papers being published each year has also been steadily rising.     

In summary this seems like an interesting and worthwhile feature.  It does depend on authors setting it up for their papers.  At the moment many haven't but hopefully more will over time.

2 comments:

  1. The Google Scholar profile with the list of papers and links to citations is indeed a very nice tool.

    You pointed out that you haven't been producing much in the way of new papers and I was wondering if you feel like sharing on this blog the reasons why that is so. Although I'm not familiar with your research work, I can see that many of your papers have a large number of citations which I assume means that your work is relevant and appreciated by the research community. Therefore, I'm intrigued why you don't keep producing more papers which would keep advancing your area of research.

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  2. I said a little about this in a post a few years ago. At the time I was between jobs, now that I am employed full time again I don't have a lot of time (or energy) for mathematics research even if I was interested.

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