Read on Twitter
1) Why you must never use GoogleScholar citation counts without checking *everything*: a relatively long thread, featuring a brilliant collection of examples from, er, my own GoogleScholar page.
2) (Some of this will repeat from an earlier blog post and brief Twitter thread, but as these things do tend to evaporate...)
3) To begin: my precious GoogleScholar page ( https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=6PPISwcAAAAJ&hl=en). Wow, I have over 50 publications! (Well, we'll come back to that...)
4) Let's begin with that very first citation to my edition of ROBERT ELSMERE. 89 citations since 2013?! Apparently everyone is passionate about this edition! Actually, no. GoogleScholar problem #1: aggregation. My citation count in fact ropes in *multiple* RE editions.
5) Books One and Two have 46 and 30 citations, respectively, which is not bad (given that I inhabit an admittedly small scholarly niche). In actuality, though, they don't. Look carefully at the images:
6) GoogleScholar problem #2: dealing with Springer (and some others). A number of sites are apparently indexing books by both titles and individual chapters (an expert could weigh in here?), so Google picks up each. chapter. as a separate citation. Nope!
7) I swear this blog post is my most influential publication ever. And you get an overlapping but *different* run of citations if you pull it up by title, rather than by my name. GoogleScholar problem #3: a combination of unorthodox venue and the "Little Professor" pseudonym.
8) Incidentally, I have other blog posts that have made it into the scholarly literature, and they don't feature anywhere in my citation count.
9) It took GoogleScholar years to realize that this article was mine. Possible GoogleScholar problem #4: the algorithm ("why is this Victorianist writing a film studies article?" wonders the algorithm.)
10) Now, *here's* an interesting problem, especially because there's an extant literature on women under-citing themselves. First, GoogleScholar problem #5: both of these articles are *missing* citations (that show up if you do a regular Google search!)...
11) ...and second, GoogleScholar problem #6: does GoogleScholar identify self-citations? Because I cited one of those articles elsewhere. Where did it go?
12) Now we get out of the top 20, and we enter the Twilight Zone of citation counts.
13) GoogleScholar problem #6: it randomly folds reviews *of* you into your own publications. (In general, GS tends to be thrown off by book reviews anyway, because they overlap on the page.)
(Whoops, that was problem #7. Don't worry, there are more!)
