My Citations in Google Scholar - A great tool for building your academic profile

Being academics, we all need to constantly publish scholarly work to slowly crawl up the academic ladder. As if the pressure of publishing work was not enough, now the new criteria for academic merit is whether the work you have published is of any use. In the early days of printed journals, it would have been a daunting task to know exactly how many citations a particular piece of work receives to ascertain this merit. However, in this connected age where almost any piece of information can be found using simple tools like Google, it is quite difficult to defend your work if it hasn't gotten any citations.

The academic community has engaged in heated debate in recent years on whether publishing scholarly work in Open Access journals increases the number of citations it receives. Logically this should be the case! However, I'm unable to provide a conclusive answer to this as we still don't really know. One way to find out whether your work is being read and appreciated is to use a software such as Scopus (http://www.scopus.com/home.url) or Publish or Perish (http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm) and periodically search for your work to see whether they have received new citations. Although easy to use, software applications such as these will require you to search with complex queries and use sophisticated filters to identify and filter out your own work (as there may be many with same or similar names). Despite being fun to see where you are placed academically, it is no fun to do this over and over again to keep track of your work. This is where the new My Citations feature by Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com.my/) comes in handy.

With the new My Citations, you can actually create your academic profile on Google Scholar itself. It will allow you to add your research interests, affiliations etc. allowing the community to see what you have been up to. It will also allow you to search and add your publications into your profile providing a straightforward view of how many citations each publication has received over the years. It will also calculate the h-index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index) which is, at present, the "number" many institutions look at when considering promotions. Another cool feature is that you can manually add the publications which haven't been picked up by Google Scholar into the list. This detailed list of publications also allows other academics to easily export full citations to your work.

All in all I think it is a neat addition to the already comprehensive and well accepted Google Scholar system. On top of you being able to keep track of your own work, your employer or potential employers will also be able to keep track of your progress.