Saturday, November 19, 2011

Google Scholar Citations Open To All

This week Google Scholar citations opened up to the public. After the initial release which was providing limited access only, the latest versions is now open for all scientists. What is interesting is that they seem to have created profiles for many scientists in an automated way. While the transparency of this is amazing, I can also imagine that there will be a push-back about privacy issues.

You can check out e.g who are the most cited scientists in Computational Biology or scientists at UCSD or check out Author profiles (e.g. yours truly). At the moment those lists are sorted by number of citations. Would be nice to have a few more sort fields like the already calculated h-index. Another missing feature is an API. Would be nice to be able to script their database and create custom reports.

I believe Google Scholar is setting a new standard for tracking success of scientists and is a serious threat to the ISI web of knowledge.