Abstract
7In the 21st century, citation analysis has become the currency for academic success. In the competition for academic accolades, individuals and institutions often measure and rank themselves by numbers derived from citation analysis. 1 This race to get a high number began innocently enough with the development by Garfield of citation indexes in the 1950s and 1960s and the description of a citation calculation that was termed impact factor, which could be used to rank journals based on the number of times works in a particular journal were cited by other researchers.2–4 As Garfield’s original company, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), was absorbed by the media conglomerate Thomson Reuters, this proprietary impact factor began to be touted as the ultimate ranking tool, not just for journals but also for individuals and institutions. This has led to considerable controversy5–16 and some ethical concerns,17–22 along with fueling a search for better numeric measures of academic quality23–27 (of course, the ultimate method to evaluate quality would be the careful examination of research publications; unfortunately, reading seems too cumbersome for administrators seeking only numbers for ranking).
With the rise of the Internet making published journal articles more widely accessible, the monopoly of Thomson Reuters on citation analysis has been broken. In 2004, the information company Google introduced Google Scholar (with the motto “Stand on the shoulders of giants”) as a full-text index of the scholarly literature that is available through the Internet. In 2006, Anne-Wil Harzing, Professor in International Management and Associate Dean Research at the University of Melbourne in Australia, introduced a software program titled “Publish or Perish” to provide a means of analyzing the Google Scholar information. She developed this program to assist in her own quest to achieve promotion to the rank of professor and then made the software program freely available on her Web site (http://www.harzing.com/) to others facing similar quests. Now, Harzing has produced a comprehensive manual to help users with this software. For the individual academician, chapter 7 titled “Making Your Case for Tenure or Promotion” is probably the most important part of the book, providing a variety of suggestions for using data to optimize an academic dossier submitted to a university promotion committee. Chapter 9 (“Tips for Deans and Other Academic Administrators”) provides important information concerning citations and compares Google Scholar with the proprietary Thomson Reuters database.
This text is an important guide to the free “Publish or Perish” software that allows academicians to analyze the widely accessible Google Scholar data.