Product Description
Citations are not only a reflection of the impact that a particular piece of academic work has generated. Citations can also be used to tell stories about academics, journals and fields of research. This book is meant to help you create effective stories, but also to teach you how to be a responsible user of research metrics.
After an introductory chapter about the history of citation analysis, data sources and citation metrics, Part 1 of the book shows you how to get the best out of the Publish or Perish software program through a detailed, step-by-step discussion of author searches, journal searches, and general searches, as well as the multi-query center. After reading the book you will be able to conduct more effective and accurate searches, and manage them in an organized way.
Part 2 of the book provides a detailed discussion of the most common day-to-day uses of the software, such as preparing for tenure and promotion, evaluating other academics, deciding on journal submission, and doing a literature review. After reading the book, you will be able to use the program more effectively and accurately for a wide variety of purposes.
Part 3 of the book discusses how to use Publish or Perish when doing bibliometric research. It provides tips and tricks in doing bibliometric research on authors and journals and presents a detailed evaluation of the two main data sources for citation analysis: Google Scholar and Thomson ISI’s Web of Science.
The Publish or Perish Book is intended for all academic and non-academic readers who want to make better use of the Publish or Perish software and the Google Scholar database in general:
* Anyone interested in making better use of the Publish or Perish software (chapters 2-6)
* Academics applying for a job, promotion, or tenure (chapters 7-8, 16)
* Deans and other academic administrators (chapters 8-9, 16)
* Academics doing literature research or writing papers or books (chapters 10-11)
* Bibliometric researchers and librarians (chapters 12-14)
* Editors and publishers of academic journals (chapters 12, 15)
* Anyone interested in the strengths and weaknesses of Google Scholar and the ISI Web of Knowledge (chapters 13-15)
About the Author
Anne-Wil Harzing is Associate Dean Research and Professor in International Management at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Since 1999 Anne-Wil maintains an extensive website (www.harzing.com). This website presents resources to assist with academic publishing and the assessment of research and journal quality, as well as software to conduct citation analysis.
From the Publisher
The first chapter provides a brief introduction to citation analysis as well as an overview of the most popular data sources and metrics in use.
Part 1: How to use Publish or Perish more effectively
The first part provides step-by-step instructions on how to use Publish or Perish more effectively. An introduction to the main features of the software is first provided in Chapter 2. Chapters 3 and 4 subsequently provide detailed instructions on how to conduct effect Author and Journal Queries. Chapter 5 is devoted to the broader applications of the General Citation search that can be used to find particular papers, conduct advanced author and journal queries, compare institutional performance and conduct a literature review. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses how the Multi-query Center can be used to effectively store and manage queries for future use.
Part 2: Day-to-day uses of Publish or Perish citation analysis
In Part 2, I present the most common day-to-day uses of the Publish or Perish software. Chapter 7 provides tips and tricks for academics that need to make their case for tenure or promotion. I discuss the importance of reference groups as well as several ways to show your citation record to its best advantage.
In Chapter 8, I discuss how to evaluate other academics. The examples in this chapter vary from a 5-minute preparation before meeting someone you don't know, to evaluating editorial board members or prospective PhD supervisors, from writing up tributes (or laudations) and eulogies to deciding on publication awards and preparing for a job interview.
Chapter 9 turns the tables and looks at citation analysis for Deans and other academic administrators. It includes four topics: the need to accept Google Scholar as an alternative data source, the myths about self-citation, the inappropriateness of citation analysis at early career stages, and the differences in citation impact across disciplines.
In Chapter 10, I show how Publish or Perish can be used to assist you when you are uncertain which journal to submit it to. It can be used to get ideas of the types of journals that publish articles on the topic you are writing on and to compare a set of journals in terms of their citation impact. Finally, once you have decided on the target journal, it can also help you to double-check that you haven't missed any prior work from the journal in question.
Chapter 11 shows you how Publish or Perish can be used to do a quick literature review to identify the most cited articles and/or scholars in a particular field. It can also be employed to identify whether any research has been done in a particular area at all (useful for grant applications). Other applications are to evaluate the development of the literature in a particular topic over time.
Finally, Chapter 12 discusses how to use Publish or Perish when doing bibliometric research. Bibliometric research refers to the quantitative analysis of bodies of literature and their references: citations. These bodies of literature can be grouped in many different ways, but in this chapter, I will focus on the grouping by author or journal and discuss some tips and tricks in doing bibliometric research on authors and journals.
Part 3: Advanced topics: delving deeper into the world of citation analysis
Part 3 of this book deals with more specialized topics. In Chapters 13 and 14, it first provides a detailed evaluation of the two main data sources for citation analysis: Google Scholar and Thomson ISI's Web of Science. I show that Google Scholar's advantages mainly lie in being a free, easy-to-use, quick and comprehensive source of citation analysis, with its disadvantages related to not being a structured bibliographic database.
ISI's main advantages lie in the fact that, as a traditional bibliographic database, it allows more complex and focused search options, the option to filter and refine queries, and further analyze results. ISI's most important disadvantage lies in its lack of comprehensive coverage, resulting in an often serious underestimation of citation impact. In addition, ISI has a number of idiosyncracies: difficulty in reliably establishing self-citations, poor handling of stray citations, and frequent misclassification of original research articles as review articles and proceedings articles.
Chapter 15 proposes an alternative to the traditionally used ISI Journal Impact Factor (JIF) to evaluate journals. It proposes both an alternative metric - Hirsch's h-index - and data source - Google Scholar - to assess journal impact. Using a comparison between the Google Scholar h-index and the ISI JIF for a sample of 838 journals in Economics & Business, I argue that the former provides a more accurate and comprehensive measure of journal impact.
Finally, Chapter 16 shows how different data sources and citation metrics impact on comparisons of academics between disciplines. This chapter analyses the citation records of ten full professors in a variety of disciplines to illustrate how different data sources and different citations metrics might lead to very different conclusions.
Appendices
At the end of the book I provide a set of appendices that include the license agreement for Publish or Perish, a command reference, the pop-menu for the results page, export formats, a complete message reference and the pop-up menu for the multi-query center list view.
Audience
The Publish or Perish Book is intended for all academic and non-academic readers who want to make better use of the Publish or Perish software and the Google Scholar database in general:
* Anyone interested in making better use of the Publish or Perish software (chapters 2-6)
* Academics applying for a job, promotion, or tenure (chapters 7-8, 16)
* Deans and other academic administrators (chapters 8-9, 16)
* Academics doing literature research or writing papers or books (chapters 10-11)
* Bibliometric researchers and librarians (chapters 12-14)
* Editors and publishers of academic journals (chapters 12, 15)
* Anyone interested in the strengths and weaknesses of Google Scholar and the ISI Web of Knowledge (chapters 13-15)
