Like so many others, yesterday morning I received an invite to the Google Scholar Citations service. This is a brief overview of what I like or don’t so far. For those who are eligible to edit a profile, when you go to Google Scholar, you should see a link or button to “My Citations.”
I was so excited, I clicked through the invitation code on my phone while riding the bus. This was a mistake. The set up process is, shall we say, not mobile friendly? I made it through the profile portion alright, but when I got to Step 2 for selecting articles to include in my profile I was in trouble.
Do you see that little button under the articles? I thought it was for “Accept these” or something. Nope, it was “Remove these”. So here I am busily going, yep, I recognize that one, it’s mine, click the button. Oops. I also had trouble with the next step, on how to handle updates. They want to make it automatic, but they’ve already put in a few articles that weren’t by me, which I had to remove. I’m not sure I trust them to get this right, but on the other hand I don’t have to remember to update the profile. I have mixed feelings about this. So, basically, don’t trust the profile to be accurate since it is probably machine-generated and may very well have errors. On the other hand, they did a pretty good job of finding my articles, including some I’d forgotten writing.
The system did NOT find my most cited article. Luckily, I could enter it manually.
I love that I can track citations both for the individual article and for my entire collection.
Now, if you want to see what a profile looks like for a REAL scientist, here are a couple that are rather different to show some of the variations.
Gary E. Martin:
Gunther Eysenbach:
The problems I have with this as a service so far is that
– it is really hard to find people,
– most people aren’t there yet,
– it doesn’t allow me to click like or follow the work of someone I consider of special interest (like Gunther),
– I don’t know how the numbers generated compare with other bibliometric tools,
and so forth. Wrinkles to iron out.
Emerging Technologies Librarian 
Wow, thanks. I hadn’t noticed this at all!
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Entirely my pleasure. I am still making up my mind about it, but always happy to have more tools! This should be great for discovery and helping to bring high quality research to the public.
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I have actually done some work on comparing Google Scholar Citations and Microsoft Academic Search as described here: http://www.chemconnector.com/2011/08/07/ongoing-comparisons-between-microsoft-academic-search-and-google-scholar-citations/
I also use both as examples of how scientists can be using such tools to enter the social network: http://www.slideshare.net/AntonyWilliams/social-networking-tools-for-novices. I hope that more scientists use them
It was funny to see that you used Gary Martin as an example. I have authored MANY times with Gary. I’m here: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=O2L8nh4AAAAJ&hl=en. I actually had to use the info re. number of publications and citations from the site for Gary to get into a discussion on notability guidelines on Wikipedia! http://tinyurl.com/7e3l6rz
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I agree that the tools need a lot of review and analysis. I would also compare them to the formal tools for citation analysis, such as WebOfScience ( apps.isiknowledge.com/ ), and emerging tools such as Readermeter ( http://readermeter.org/ ) and Collabgraph ( https://collabgraph.xcend.de/ ). Regarding the problems with Wikipedia, you hit the nail on the head as far as challenges with the community guidelines and the tricky balance between bias and authority. One strategy that has potential (but which does not completely resolve the question) is the NIH-Wikipedia partnership ( http://www.nih.gov/icd/od/ocpl/resources/wikipedia/ ).
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