Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Google Scholar Continues to Improve

Every few months Google Scholar seems to undergo a rebuild of their database and housekeeping exercise. Before the exercise, lists of references are no longer in exact order of the number of citations they have received. Rather they are in order of the number they received at the last rebuild. Another rebuild has occurred today. In this rebuild they have managed to aggregate together stray citations much better than ever before. All the citations to my two most cited articles (both in World Development) have now been aggregated into single entries in the database rather than being spread across several entries with slightly different bibliographic data. I don't know whether accuracy has similarly improved in terms of number of citations. Previously, there could be some double counting of the same paper in the list of citations to an article. It's likely that that has improved too. There are still some split entries but it is much better than before and should be much more user-friendly for counting h-indices etc.

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