Google Scholar is a search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an range of publishing formats and disciplines. In addition to content from publishers, Google Scholar searches many institutional and subject repositories. The exact details of what is indexed are not made public by Google.
This recipe will show you how to gather:
You can use Google Scholar to find the number of citations for a specific item and to maintain a scholarly profile that correctly associates your work with your name and affiliation. If you create a Google Scholar Profile and make it public, the search engine will do most of the work for you to find newly published items and citations to your publications.
We use Google Scholar because:
Before you get started, we recommend having a copy of the cv handy and a file to record the data. We use Excel, but if you prefer Word tables, those work too. A sample table structure is below.
| Citation or Title | Citation count | Notable citations |
| Gesselman, A. N., Bigatti, S. M., Garcia, J. R., Coe, K., Cella, D., & Champion, V. L. (2017). Spirituality, emotional distress, and post‐traumatic growth in breast cancer survivors and their partners: an actor–partner interdependence modeling approach. Psycho‐oncology, 26(10), 1691-1699. | 10 | (best identified by you) |
| Bigatti, S. M., Hernandez, A. M., Cronan, T. A., & Rand, K. L. (2008). Sleep disturbances in fibromyalgia syndrome: relationship to pain and depression. Arthritis Care & Research: Official Journal of the American College of Rheumatology, 59(7), 961-967. | 353 | (best identified by you) |
Once you have created your Google Scholar Profile and made it public, the search engine will begin to identify scholarly items that you may have created and add them to your profile. Your profile will show up when users search Google Scholar for your name. Additionally, when users retrieve an item created by you, your name will be hyperlinked so they can click on it to access your profile and other things you have created.
Your profile is primarily a list of your scholarly items, the year in which they were published, and the number of citations received by each item. You can click on the number in the Cited By column to see what items have cited yours.
