Ian – that’s really
worth knowing.
It chimes with
another query I had recently where someone had changed their
name and was struggling to get GS to recognise their
publications under a previous name, and their publications
under a new one. Thankfully I suggested they edited their
name in the hope that when they then went to “Add
publications” it would suggest papers that matched their new
name not their old one which they could then add. Failing
that, they could add their papers manually, and hopefully GS
would use their latest papers to automatically harvest the
right ones in future. It sounds like if I’d suggested
starting a new profile it might have lost some of the
earlier data. Pure luck!
I don’t think I’ll be
trying your experiment though!
Lizzie
From: A bibliometrics discussion list for the
Library and Research Community
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Rowlands, Ian
Sent: 08 February 2017 12:16
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Dealing with Google Scholar Citation
errors
I’ve
been lurking on this thread because the point I wanted to
raise about GS citation profiles was rather different, and I
didn’t want to divert from a very interesting exchange …
I
set up a profile some time ago, probably 6-7 years back. I
recently moved to a new institution and thought I’d better
change my affiliation. Not straightforward because the
email account I verified from initially has of course now
lapsed. So, I created a new one from scratch, and then got
an email from GS saying I had duplicates, which one did I
want to delete? The old one.
The
citation count in the new profile is down about 15%. I
assume that’s because I’ve been out of research for a while
and GS can only scrape what’s available on the web. I
assume that GS counts the citations it finds cumulatively,
so even if the underlying material disappears, the counter
and associated metrics stay where they are.
So
two lessons. The first is to set up your GS profile as soon
as possible, preferably some years ago! The second lesson,
if my analysis is correct, is that the headline metrics
gradually become decoupled from the underlying data as it
disappears from the web. There’s a transparency issue here
and a lack of traceability that could become quite serious
over time.
You
can of course try this experiment for yourselves. Create a
new GS profile and see whether the metrics have changed?
Ian
From:
A bibliometrics discussion list for the Library and
Research Community [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Elizabeth Gadd
Sent: 08 February 2017 10:59
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Dealing with Google Scholar Citation
errors
Thank you all for
your responses. So it sounds as though there is no real
source of troubleshooting on GS other than
Lis-Bibliometrics! I think our problems began by
encouraging all staff to create GS profiles. As is often
the way, it is the PhD students who are the most keen to
engage with new initiatives and then those with Asian names
fell foul of the author disambiguation problem. Be careful
of what you wish for…
Lizzie
From: A bibliometrics discussion list for the
Library and Research Community [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Anne-Wil Harzing
Sent: 07 February 2017 11:47
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Dealing with Google Scholar Citation
errors
Lizzie,
Tricky problem!
@Chris: Yes, having an ORCID is good and everyone should
have one, but IMHO it will be many years before this helps
author disambiguation in GS (or Scopus/ISI for that
matter!). Try searching for an Asian author in ISI. Did you
know the top 1000 most productive academics are all Asian?
[Not really of course]. For details see:
http://www.harzing.com/blog/2016/05/health-warning-might-contain-multiple-personalities
Google
Scholar Profiles do NOT appear out of the blue sky. They are
created by authors and it is the responsibility of the
authors to keep them clean. A very simple solution is to
hammer home that they should click the box to have the
profiles updated MANUALLY not automatically, so that any
addition MUST be screened by the author before it is added
to the profile. Most of the time academics are either just a
bit lazy or ignorant and don't know this updating option
can be changed.
Contacting GS is not going to help you, my prediction is there
is a 99% likelihood they won't respond. In this case, I would
say rightly so, it is the responsibility of the academics who
have created the profile to manage it and keep it clean, it is
not their responsibility. If Thomson Reuthers/Clarivate and
Elsevier can't even manage to do this whilst charging huge
subscription fees, you cannnot expect a free service to do so.
Alan: your email just came in as I was writing this. My
experience is identical to yours. In fact, I have to submit
data change reports to TR/Clarivate for their Cited Reference
reports virtually every week and the problem is often as
simple as a publication referenced as AW Harzing vs. A Harzing
with EVERYTHING else on the paper identical.
On 07/02/2017 11:39, Alan
Dix wrote:
I recall some years
ago, when Google scholar was still young, comparing
lists of my own publications at GS and Web of Science.
They found
different publications, but at that point *both* had
problems - WoS was particularly bad at identifying the
same author on different papers spelled differently
(initials, vs fullness, second forename, etc.) so had
a lot of false negatives, however both also had false
positives.
I'm sure both will
have improved and as you note Chris ORCID will
eventually help both, but certainly at that point WoS
had its one data integrity problems. For finding
citations for a paper, I have confidence in both GS
& WoS, and Scopus identifying the publication
reasonably well, but for identifying authors I'd treat
any simple league tables with a pinch of salt.
On 7 February 2017
at 11:13, Christian Pietsch <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
Dear Lizzie,
dear all,
On Tue, Feb 07, 2017 at 10:35:09AM +0000, Elizabeth
Gadd wrote:
> My more specific question is whether anyone has
had an issue with
> their institutional ranking on Google Scholar
(where you search for
> an institution and it lists all the academics
associated with that
> institution in rank order by citation count)?
Because of the
> age-old author disambiguation problem, we have
quite a few PhD
> students with common Asian names appearing in our
Top 10 author list
> who have had papers erroneously assigned to them,
thus falsely
> inflating their citation count. This is causing
some disgruntlement
> amongst those usurped of a Top 10 place! I think
the only way of
> fixing this is to ask the individuals involved to
remove the
> erroneous papers, however, this is challenging
when the individuals
> have left.
Bear in mind that you cannot force people to have a
Google account.
Without a Google account, they probably cannot fix
that list directly.
One thing you could try is to encourage people to get
an ORCID. This
may help Google and others to disambiguate author
names eventually.
Other than that, I'm afraid all you can do now is to
educate your
patrons about Google's bad data quality. They simply
must not base any
decisions on this.
Cheers,
Chris
--
Christian Pietsch ·
http://purl.org/net/pietsch / involved in
– Bielefeld Academic Search
Engine:
https://base-search.net
– ORCID DE (spreading ORCID in
Germany; see
https://orcid.org/)
at Bielefeld University
Library, Bielefeld, Germany
--
Professor Alan
Dix
University of Birmingham, UK