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Measuring and Increasing Your Research Impact

Engineering Librarian & CAPLA Liaison

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Paula C Johnson
Contact:
Main Library A403
520-621-9862

Introduction

This section covers the use of Google Scholar for citation counts and identifies other applications that can be used with the resulting citation counts to provide additional functionality and information. The material presented here is divided into the following categories:

Citation Searching in Google Scholar

The citation information in Google Scholar is extracted from the scholarly journal articles within the Scholar database and from the U.S. patents contained in the Google Patents database.   Users have the option to eliminate the patents as the source of citation data and/or the option to include citations from legal journals and opinions from the federal and state courts.     If a publication has been cited by these sources, it will contain a "Cited By Link" in its entry; clicking on that link will display the citing journal articles and patents (and the court opinions, if selected)

  How to Find Citation Counts via Google Scholar and "Who is Citing Whom"

  1. Go to Google Scholar.
  2. Select Advanced Scholar Search (link to right of search button).
  3. Enter the appropriate search terms for the item under study.  Enter just enough information to find what you need - do not fill in the complete search form.    
  4. Click on the Search Scholar button.
  5. Locate the correct article in the search results list.
  6. If the article was cited by others, you will see a "Cited by" link at the bottom of the record. Click this link to view who has cited this item. For more information about searching see Google Scholar's Help pages.

To note::

  • Google Scholar does not index all scholarly articles; therefore, some articles citing the item under study may not be counted.
  • Author names can be tricky to search and the results can vary greatly depending on how the name is entered; we recommend searching only the author's last name and combining that with the main title in quotations.
  • Variants in how the item is cited can result in more than one entry for the item under study.
  • The term "citation" in brackets [CITATION] at the beginning of an entry, indicates that the full text of the item is not accessible through Google Scholar. 

Connecting Google Scholar results with NMSU's journal subscriptions

Many researchers are finding it handy to use Google Scholar to find references to journal citations. The steps outlined below describe how researchers at NMSU can customize Google Scholar to facilitate exporting the citations to EndNoteWeb.

First, about Google Scholar:

  • Allows one to search the FULL TEXT of journal articles from thousands of publishers. (The list of publishers that have allowed Google to search behind their firewalls has not been revealed).
  • You can configure the settings to link to articles for which NMSU Library holds a subscription
  • Many of the records are just links to citations not to the actual article; you will not be able to download these citations
  • Read more about Google Scholar: Comparison of Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus  

Setting the preferences is necessary when using a computer with an off-campus IP address. This will let you use the University of Arizona Library Full-Text @ UA links for citations, as well as export the citations to EndNote Basic.

  • Go to Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com
  • Click on Settings:

  • For compatibility with EndNote Basic:
    • Under Settings (from menu, top left) select Bibliography Manager, and then choose Show links to Import citations into EndNote.

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  • In the Library Links, search for University of Arizona and select. You may choose additional linkage, as shown below: