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. A note: clicking on the "Get it at UC" button can also be used to find full text of an article.

Fill in the author field and other known information to find the desired article. 

A Sample Search

This article is cited in 30 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 (AL Kramer L Li, R Connolly, M Barbato, and Y Zhu 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.

Google Scholar provides further information and searching tips.

There is information on:

• Alerts
• Exporting Citations
• Coverage
• Corrections
• Questions