Citation analysis based on Google Scholar

• Main Author: Oh, Kalyn Hui Yi
• Other Authors: School of Computer Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Information systems::Information storage and retrieval
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/58972
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Google Scholar is an increasingly popular search engine with the largest bibliographic database for citation analysis that is accessible to anyone unlike other bibliographic databases which may incur monthly fees. With the increase of publications of scholarly papers, there is an increase in demand for quality measurement of papers for assessing the author’s publication works. The evaluations of author’s publications rely on citation analysis as to achieve an unbiased evaluation of an author’s work. H-index is one of the mostly used citation metric, thus, two unique additional calculations of h-index with unknown authors’ citations per paper and citations without self-citation of the author were included and compared against the original h-index calculation in this report. Hence, this report presents the study of the citation analysis of citation records based on Google Scholar. A python parser tool was implemented to parse information from Google Scholar based on three author name searches namely: “Xiaokui Xiao”, “Yunhao Liu” and “Mong LiLee”. Three different h-index versions were calculated and the results were analyzed. The results have shown that a relatively high self-citation by the authors have significant contribution to the overall citation counts that may affect the h-index value, leading to a slight increase in the value of h-index. However, a small value of self-citation does not affect the h-index value. When comparing the two unique h-index versions, version 2 and 3, version 2 has more impact on the overall value of the h-index. Overall, author “Yunhao Liu” has achieved the highest citation counts and the highest h-index value among the other authors, indicating that its publications have high significant contribution, quality and impact to the other authors. In addition, Google Scholar has limitation such as displaying issues, blockage problems and non-scholarly sources that may distort citation metrics. Thus, there are pros and cons when using Google Scholar as citation analysis source. Hence, the citation statistic results obtained from Google Scholar for the different authors reflect the significance and the impact of the authors ’publications. The higher the total numbers of citation, the better the h-index, the higher impact and quality of the publication papers of the authors’.