Impact Metrics and Scholarly Attribution

Google Scholar is an Internet database that includes journal articles, conference papers, theses, books, pre-prints, abstracts, technical reports and other scholarly publications.

Material originates from publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Patents can be included in a search, or a search can be focused on legal documents.

You can use Google Scholar to see who is citing an article you wrote in order to get a sense of that article's impact. (Or as a research aid, you can track the citations of any article of interest.)

Google Scholar, however, does not cover specific journal titles or years. Content is gathered using web crawlers. Non-scholarly sources can be included in the results. Thus it should only be used only in conjunction with other methods.

Google Scholar Citation Search

Go to Google Scholar. Accessing on campus through the UCLA network or remotely via UCLA VPN will allow direct access (by clicking on the article title) to the full text of articles that are licensed to UCLA Libraries. Clicking on the UC-eLinks notation can also be used to find full text of an article.

For a more precise search click on the down arrow in the search box to access the Advanced Search template.

Fill in the author field and other known information to find the desired article. The where my words occur field can be set to look for the search words anywhere in the article or anywhere in the title. (Besides searching for a known article, Google Scholar can also be used to discover articles by subject using appropriate keywords.)

Click the blue search icon.

A Sample Search

Searching for an article authored by M. Veloso with the words "robot learning" in the title, leads to results that include:

This article is cited in 324 publications. You can see the list (and where those articles are cited) by clicking on Cited by.

Google's assessment of similar articles can be accessed by clicking Related Articles.

If an author has a Google Scholar Citations Author Profile (recommended), then a graph of an article's citation history per year can be viewed. Authors with profiles have underlined names (see M. Veloso in the above citation). Click on the name to access, find the article in the profile's listing of publications, and click on its title to view the graph.

After finding an article and clicking on Cited By to see what other articles have cited it, it's possible be notified of future citations.

In the right hand panel of the Cited By results, click on Create alert icon and complete the order form with your email address.

Google Scholar provides further information and searching tips.

There is information on:

• Alerts
• Exporting Citations
• Coverage
• Corrections
• Questions