For university lecturers, the promotion process takes into account the achievements and reputation of their scholarly activities. As a promotion criterion, most universities demand that lecturers have both national and international reputation. Having a national (and international) reputation means that their academic publishing has been disseminated widely and is frequently cited by other scholars. But how do you know when citations are made to your work? This article focuses on the role of Google Scholar.
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. With Google Scholar, you can keep tab on your citations and easily measure your academic visibility. Many researchers appreciate Google Scholar because it provides information on the total citations, h-index and i10-index of individual scholarly works.
The h–index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar. The index is based on the set of the scientist’s most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications.
i10–index is the newest in the line of journal metrics and was introduced by Google Scholar in 2011. It is a simple and straightforward indexing measure found by tallying a journal’s total number of published papers with at least 10 citations (Google Scholar Blog, 2011). Simply put, the i10–index indicates the number of academic publications an author has written that have been cited by at least ten sources.
Are you new to the academic or research world? It’s never too late to increase your visibility. To begin, you can open a Google Scholar account or research gate (Your institutional email may be required for this. This is optional anyway). Even though your academic paper has been published online, it may not appear in your Google Scholar profile. Good news is that you can manually upload your articles on your Google Scholar profile and you will be notified anytime a citation is made to the article… and this boosts your citation count!!!
Take the steps today. Create a Google Scholar Profile, Upload your publications, and increase your academic visibility.
Learn more about academic visibility here
