{"id":462,"date":"2011-11-20T21:34:20","date_gmt":"2011-11-21T02:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/?p=462"},"modified":"2011-12-28T12:48:57","modified_gmt":"2011-12-28T17:48:57","slug":"google-scholar-and-high-impact-publication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/2011\/11\/20\/google-scholar-and-high-impact-publication\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Scholar and High-Impact Publication"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Academics\u00a0feel\u00a0narcissistic or anti-intellectual when we\u00a0check citations to\u00a0our work, but it isn’t just an ego thing. Citations tell us\u00a0who is using our\u00a0research and who\u00a0we <\/em>should be reading — a big\u00a0help in\u00a0making\u00a0intellectual connections.\u00a0If we\u00a0really want people\u00a0to\u00a0read the work we spend so much time writing, then we need to figure out why some articles rise and others (ahem) drop from cite<\/em>. Analysis can also reveal\u00a0correctable mistakes.\u00a0We may have written\u00a0the right paper for the\u00a0wrong audience or used a title\u00a0or abstract that all but guaranteed\u00a0our work\u00a0would never be read or referenced.<\/p>\n

I ran the numbers, but never looked much at citation indexes until\u00a0seeing Google Scholar, which tends to\u00a0be more inclusive and useful than other indexes.\u00a0Editing TheSocietyPages.org<\/a>, though, I’m starting to think we need new ways of measuring both scholarly and public impact. For example, I’m convinced that\u00a0Lisa Wade and Gwen Sharp are having an enormous impact at Sociological Images<\/a>, but it isn’t (yet) counted in ways that make sense to the Social Science Citation Index or\u00a0Google Scholar. I’m not just talking about hit counts—increasingly,\u00a0students and other scholars are adopting\u00a0the site’s\u00a0sensibility and and its application to the visual\u00a0social world.<\/p>\n

For now, though, Google Scholar represents a huge advance over the sort of citation trackers we had just a few years ago. Seeing Philip Cohen’s<\/a> google scholar profile this morning, I made my own<\/a>.\u00a0A few observations:<\/p>\n

1. Scale. <\/strong>Before constructing such a profile, you should know that some people and papers get cited a lot<\/em>, <\/em>but it takes most of us a few\u00a0years to develop an audience. <\/em>Nobody cited my stuff at all as an assistant professor, but folks began excavating the\u00a0nuggets once a few pieces got a little attention.\u00a0In Google, as elsewhere,\u00a0try not to compare yourself against\u00a0the\u00a0standard set by the top senior scholars in your field (a.k.a. “Sampson Envy”).<\/p>\n

2. Inclusiveness. <\/strong>Google scholar is indeed more inclusive than other sources. For me, at least, it\u00a0includes three times the citations\u00a0and\u00a0twice the number of writings\u00a0than SSCI (2,578 citations in Google to 84 “things” (articles, chapters, grant reports, committee documents) and 767 citations in SSCI to 35 journal articles). Some may find it overinclusive<\/em>, but Google\u00a0seems\u00a0far more\u00a0effective in bringing to light intriguing intellectual connections.\u00a0For instance, I learned that a\u00a0Swedish\u00a0economist found use for one of my\u00a0papers in a\u00a0presentation on the “entrepreneurial life course of men and women”—which jazzed up my own thinking about a project on entrepreneurship and prisoner reentry.<\/p>\n

3. Bias? <\/strong>For me, at least, the Social Sciences Citation Index\u00a0seems to\u00a0give a pretty misleading picture of scholarly impact. Since SSCI doesn’t count books or book chapters, it misses a couple more-cited pieces—a book with Jeff Manza and a popular chapter in an edited volume. [Junior scholars are often\u00a0told to\u00a0avoid writing\u00a0book chapters, but some of them seem to find a pretty good audience.] Also, when I rank the articles by citation count, Google seems to have better face validity\u00a0— it does a better job picking up the contributions that people ask me about\u00a0than SSCI. As\u00a0chair in a department that values both books and articles, the omission of books in\u00a0any index\u00a0is really problematic.\u00a0I haven’t done a careful analysis, but my sense is that\u00a0Google Scholar is also better than SSCI at tracking my criminological and interdisciplinary work.<\/p>\n

4. Flagships. <\/strong>But still ….\u00a0articles in the\u00a0so-called sociology flagships get cited way more often than\u00a0articles in other journals or book chapters.\u00a0By either index,\u00a0my\u00a03 most-cited pieces (and 6 of the top 16) appeared in\u00a0American Sociological Review<\/em> or American Journal of Sociology<\/em>.<\/p>\n

5. Future. <\/strong>I expect that people will always want to assess the scholarly and public impact of academic work, and that\u00a0these tools will evolve\u00a0rapidly.\u00a0Google Scholar offers a great set of tools already, but I suspect we’ll soon be able to run much more sophisticated searches that allow us to track impact across a broader spectrum of outlets.\u00a0People are sure to debate\u00a0“what counts” as a citation, but the\u00a0really big honkin’\u00a0question concerns\u00a0“what counts” as scholarly\u00a0publication. My sense is that journal impact\u00a0will remain important, but we’ll soon have the tools to identify and assess a\u00a0more robust\u00a0and varied set of\u00a0impacts. And that’s a good thing for pages like these.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Academics\u00a0feel\u00a0narcissistic or anti-intellectual when we\u00a0check citations to\u00a0our work, but it isn’t just an ego thing. Citations tell us\u00a0who is using our\u00a0research and who\u00a0we should be reading — a big\u00a0help in\u00a0making\u00a0intellectual connections.\u00a0If we\u00a0really want people\u00a0to\u00a0read the work we spend so much time writing, then we need to figure out why some articles rise and others (ahem) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":467,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10972,10973,626],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-publication","tag-sampson-envy","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/files\/2011\/11\/High_Impact_Research.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":464,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions\/464"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}