Using Publish or Perish Software

Guides

e-Resources General Guides Citation Counting

Publish or Perish

Introduction Publish or Perish (PoP) uses Google Scholar queries to obtain citation information, which is then analysed and converted to a variety of metrics (see Appendix). The results can also be copied or saved into Microsoft Word or Excel.

1. Launching the Software Step 1: Download the software for free from www.harzing.com/pop.htm. Step 2: Launch the application from your desktop or go to Start > All Programs > Publish or Perish. 2. Main window The most important areas in the PoP main window are shown below.

Navigation panel contains the links to the citation analysis pages and various program resources

Announcement panel displays announcements about the PoP software or related topics

Articles and books found

Impact is measured by the calculated statistics from results returned by the search query

Query panel (available fields depend on search type)

3. Search types Two of the search types available include: 1) Author impact analysis 2) Journal impact analysis

1) Author impact analysis This page allows you to perform a quick analysis of the impact of an author's publications (see Appendix for the citation metrics in the results pane). i. To perform a basic impact analysis: 1) When the Harzing PoP screen displays, choose Author Impact by clicking the tab at the top left.

2) Enter the authors name in the Author name field with his/her first initial and surname in double quotes, e.g. "a harzing".

3) Click Lookup or press Enter key.

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Tips on using search terms effectively 1) PoP is not case dependent, e.g. "A HARZING" gives the same result as "a harzing" 2) The order of search terms does not matter, e.g. "A Harzing" will give the same result as "Harzing A". 3) Use an authors initials (no space between initials) rather than their full given name as not all journals publish author names in full. 4) If an author has consistently published with only one initial, you can exclude namesakes using 2nd and 3rd initials by using wildcards in the "Exclude these names" field, e.g. when searching for "G Sewell", you can exclude "G* Sewell" and "G** Sewell".

5) If an author has published under two different names (e.g. maiden name and married name) use OR (not case-sensitive) between search terms for a combined search. 6) If an author has mostly published with two initials, but has some publications with only one initial, a combined search with initials and full given name (e.g. "CT Kulik" OR "Carol Kulik") will usually capture all of their publications.

7) Do not try to use the AND keyword in an author search. Google Scholar does not recognize this keyword and will treat it as a normal search word. Instead, just enter multiple author names; this will behave as an "AND" search by default.

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Limiting Options 1) Limiting year a. Enter the start or end years in the Year of publication between ... and ... fields to analyse the author's publications from a given period.

b. Before limiting the year range, always check whether an author has highly cited publications that do not include the year of publication, i.e. leave the year fields blank. In some cases, Google Scholars parsing does not include the year of publication in the cited work. This means that if you restrict the years of publication, this work will not show up. 2) Limiting subject areas a. Do not uncheck subject areas unless absolutely necessary (e.g. because the author has a very common name). b. Authors can have publications in more than one subject area. Some publications are unclassified and will not show up if you leave even just one subject area unticked. (Note: to be on the safe side, always double-check results with all subject fields ticked, especially if one of your publications seems to be missing).

c. Resubmit the search by clicking Lookup again.

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Refining Options In many cases, the list of results will contain works of authors that are not the intended author. Cleaning the list is a first priority, to ensure that you are capturing only works by the person that you want. You can refine the citation search and analysis with one or more of the following methods: 1) (De) Selecting results a. Selecting relevant publications for unchecking or merging can be made easier by first sorting the results by Cites, Authors, Title, Year, Publication, or Publisher.

Sorting is done simply by clicking on the corresponding column heading.

b. You can manually include or exclude citations from the analysis by checking or clearing the boxes in the Results list. They will automatically be removed from the statistics, but will still be visible in the main window.

The Check all button places check marks in all boxes Simply remove the tick mark in the first column by clicking on it. The Uncheck all button unchecks all boxes If the list is long, it might be easier to deselect all publications first by clicking Uncheck all and then only select the relevant publications

When you resort any of the columns after unchecking a box, checked items will always sort before unchecked items.

2) Merging results If the results contain duplicate entries, you can merge them by dragging and dropping the duplicate entries onto the master record.

The resulting item has a small "double document" icon

Note: The merged information uses the title, authors, etc. information from the target item (the one onto which the other items are dropped). The merged item's total citations are the sum of all constituent items. The citation metrics are updated accordingly.

To correct a mistake, rightclick the entry and click Split Citations

3) Excluding results a. If you see the same confuser names coming up several times, and they are clearly different from the author name you want, enter them using double quotes into the Exclude these names field near the top of the screen.

You can enter more than one exclusion in the Exclude these names field b. Resubmit the search by clicking Lookup again.

b) Journal impact analysis This page allows you to perform a quick analysis of the impact of a journal's publications (see Appendix for the citation metrics in the results pane).

i. To perform a basic impact analysis: 1) Enter the journal title with double quotes around it in the Journal title field.

2) Click Lookup or press Enter key. ii. Tips on using search terms effectively Title matching is not case-sensitive, e.g. Journal, journal and JOURNAL all match the same publications. iii. Limiting Options 1) Limit the year if you want to analyse the journals publications from a given period. 2) Limit the subject areas to search in if you know the subject area in which the journal is usually classified. o Note: Google's subject classification is not always spot-on.

Click Lookup to resubmit the search again

Enter the start or end years in the Year of publication between ... and ... fields.

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Uncheck the corresponding boxes to restrict the subject area search

iv. Refining Options In many cases, the list of results will contain works in journals that are not the intended journal. You can refine the citation search and analysis with one or more of the following methods: 1) Selecting relevant publications for unchecking

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Sort the results by Publication by clicking on the relevant heading

Click the button uncheck selection.

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Select all unwanted journals by left-clicking and holding down the shift key

Alternatively, you can manually include or exclude citations from the analysis by checking or clearing the boxes in the Results list.

Simply remove the tick mark in the first column by clicking on it.

Note: When you resort any of the columns after unchecking a box, checked items will always sort before unchecked items.

2) Merging results If the results contain duplicate entries, you can merge them by dragging and dropping the duplicate entries onto the master record.

The resulting item has a small "double document" icon

Note: The merged information uses the title, authors, etc. information from the target item (the one onto which the other items are dropped). The merged item's total citations are the sum of all constituent items. The citation metrics are updated accordingly.

To correct a mistake, rightclick the entry and click Split Citations

3) Excluding results To exclude certain journal titles, enter title words in the Exclude these words field near the top of the screen. Note: Apply this strategy with extreme care, as Google Scholar matches exclude these words anywhere in the papers (i.e. including the list of references for those publications).

You can enter > 1 word in the Exclude these words field.

Click Lookup again to resubmit your search.

v. Searching for citations of chapters in an edited volume The Journal Impact search can also be used to search for publications in other sources. For example, in order to assess the overall impact of an edited book, you would need to search for citations to individual chapters as well as citations to the book as a whole.

Enter the title of the edited volume, preferably within quotes Enter the copyright year of the volume in both fields
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Click Lookup

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4. Results
a) Results pane The results pane is part of the Author impact analysis and Journal impact analysis. Although each page has its own copy of the results pane, they operate identically.

The upper text field displays the citation metrics for the currently selected query Results list is sorted by descending number of citations by default Click once to sort by the column header, and twice to reverse the sort order. The lower list displays all results for the currently selected query.

Selecting or unselecting results will immediately update the citation metrics in the upper text field

Note: Google Scholar limits its results to 1000. The results are ranked by number of citations, so any 1000 shown are the most-cited results. b) Linking to Google Scholar

Double-clicking on an item will bring you to the Google Scholar list of items citing your item

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Click on the item above the green bar to access the original cited article

Click on Full-Text @ My Library to access the full text of articles subscribed by NIE
Note: Google Scholar must be configured first.

Note: If an item does not have any citations, a general Google search results page is displayed for the item. c) Copying statistics and results i. Copying statistics to Word
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Left-click in the upper text field to give it the keyboard focus, then use Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C to select and copy.

Use Ctrl+V to paste the text in Word

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ii. Copying statistics and/or results to Excel

Right-click in the lower text field, and a popup menu appears.

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Click Copy Statistics for Excel with Header to copy the statistics Click Copy Results for Excel with Header to copy the results
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Open an Excel file, and use Ctrl+V to paste the separate parts (or click the Paste icon)

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d) Exporting results You can export the citation data to EndNote, as well as to other citation managers such as BibTeX, CSV and RefMan/RIS. The general procedure is as follows: i. First, save the results in an EndNote Import File.

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Choose File > Save As EndNote from the main menu

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In the results pane, check the citation lines that you want to export. By default, all lines are checked and thus exported.

2b

Alternatively, right-click in the lower-text field, then click Save as EndNote

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Second, open the EndNote Library you want the results to be exported to (Go to Start > All Programs > EndNote > EndNote Program > File > Open > Open Library).

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Then, open the newly created EndNote Important File in the folder/desktop you saved it into by right-clicking it and select Open or double left-clicking the file.

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The references will appear in your EndNote library under Imported References.

Check that the citations are entered in correctly according to the desired bibliographic style, and edit as necessary.

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Appendix - Citation Metrics in Results Pane Basic Metrics Displayed as Papers Definition

Number of papers

Total number of papers by the academic/journal found in Google Scholar.

Note: Nearly always an overestimation due to duplicates caused by inaccurate referencing.

Number of citations

Citations

Total number of citations to papers listed for the author or journal you search for.
Note: Usually fairly accurate as not influenced by duplicates.

Years (Active)

Years

Number of years since the authors or journals first article was published. Calculated as follows: current year - (first year of publication - 1).
Note: Provides a conservative estimate. Check for offending publications by sorting the data by year.

Average number of citations per paper

Cites/ paper

Calculated by dividing the total number of citations by the total number of papers.
Note: A very useful metric to assess the average impact for a journal or author, if you have carefully merged all stray citations into a master record and have unchecked all irrelevant publications.

Average number of citations per year

Cites /year

Calculated by dividing the total number of citations by the number of years the author or journal has been publishing papers.
Note: A useful metric to assess the yearly impact for a journal or author. Can be used as an alternative to the contemporary h-index. Sorting on the citation per year column in the results pane allows one to assess an authors or journals most influential publications.

Average number of citations per author

Cites /author

Calculated by first dividing the number of citations for each paper by the number of authors for that paper. The resulting citations are then added up.
Note: Can be seen as the single-authored equivalent for the author or journal in question. Gives a fairly good picture of an academics individual impact and can be used as an alternative to the individual hindex (although the latter incorporates both impact and productivity).

Average number of papers per author

Papers/ author

Calculated by first dividing each paper by the number of authors, resulting in a number between 0 and 1 (sole authorship). Subsequently, these fractional author counts are added up.
Note: Seen as the single-authored equivalent for the author or journal in question. Gives a fairly good picture of an academics individual productivity and can be used as an alternative to the individual h-index (although the latter incorporates both impact and productivity).

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Basic Metrics

Displayed as Authors/ paper

Definition

Average number of authors per paper

Calculated by adding up the total number of authors involved in the result set for the author or journal in question and dividing this by the number of papers
Note: Gives an indication of the extent to which an author or journal publishes sole authored or co-authored articles. Not as good a reflection of an authors individual productivity as the average number of papers per author.

H-index

h-index

A scientist has index h if h of his/her N p papers have at least h citations each, and the other (N p -h) papers have no more than h citations each.
Example: An academic has a h-index of 20 if 20 of his/her papers have at least 20 citations each and each of his/her other papers have no more than 20 citations each

G-index

g-index

Given a set of articles ranked in decreasing order of the number of citations that they received, the g-index is the (unique) largest number such that the top g articles received 2 (together) at least g citations.
Example: An academic has a g-index of 30 if the top 30 most cited of his/her papers combined have at least 900 citations. Note: Aims to improve on h-index by giving more weight to highly-cited articles.

E-index

e-index

Defined as the square root of the surplus of citations in the 2 h-set beyond h , that is, beyond the theoretical minimum required to obtain a h-index of h.
Example: If an academic has an h-index of 10, but has a total of 200 citations to the first 10 published articles, his/her e-index would be 10 (the square root of 200 minus the theoretical minimum required to obtain a h-index of 10, i.e. 100) Note: Aims to differentiate between scientists with similar h-indices but different citation patterns. Gives more attention to highly-cited articles.

Contemporary h-index

Hc-index

Adds an age-related weighting to each cited article, giving less weight to older articles. The weighting is parameterized (gamma=4 and delta =1)
Example: For an article published during the current year, its citations account four times. For an article published 4 years ago, its citations account only one time. For an article published 6 years ago, its citations account 4/6 times and so on.

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Getting Help For more information, visit the PoP webpage (www.harzing.com/pop.html) or consult the PoP guidebooks available in the library (Call no: Z669.8 Har): o o o o The publish or perish book: Your guide to effective and responsible citation analysis The publish or perish book. Part 1, a guide to the software The publish or perish book. Part 2, citation analysis for academics and administrators The publish or perish book. Part 3, doing bibliometric research with Google Scholar

Disclaimer: This user guide is based on the PoP helpfile (http://www.harzing.com/pophelp/index.htm), and The publish or perish book: Your guide to effective and responsible citation analysis (ISBN 9780980848519) by Anne-Wil Harzing.
The PoP software was developed by Professor Anne-Wil Harzing of Melbourne University and was first introduced in October 2006. PoP runs on Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms.

For enquiries on Publish or Perish, please contact Reference Services at libref@nie.edu.sg or 6219-6115 / 6790-3631. Maintained by: Stephanie Ow Last modified date: 20 February 2012

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