Using Google Scholar to track the scholarly output of research groups.

Publisher: Ubiquity Press Country of Publication: Netherlands NLM ID: 101590643 Publication Model: Print Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 2212-277X (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 22122761 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Perspect Med Educ Subsets: MEDLINE

Publication: 2023- : [London] : Ubiquity Press
Original Publication: [Houten] : Bohn Stafleu van Loghum

Biomedical Research*/organization & administration ; Databases, Bibliographic* ; Journal Impact Factor*; Emergency Medicine ; Humans ; Internet ; Search Engine

Introduction: It is often necessary to demonstrate the impact of a research program over time both within and beyond institutions. However, it is difficult to accurately track the publications of research groups over time without significant effort. A simple, scalable, and economical way to track publications from research groups and their metrics would address this challenge.
Methods: Google Scholar automatically tracks the scholarly output and citation counts of individual researchers. We created Google Scholar profiles to track the scholarly productivity of five research groups: an institutional educational research program, a division of emergency medicine, a department of emergency medicine, a national educational scholarship working group, and an international organization dedicated to online education. We added the publications of each group member to their respective group Google Scholar profile and a junior faculty member monitored the citations that were suggested.
Results: Google Scholar tracked a diverse collection of five research groups over 6-36 months. In addition to having different organizational structures and purposes, the groups varied in size, consisting of 8-60 researchers, and prolificacy, with group citation counts between 1006-58,380 and group h‑indexes ranging from 19-101.
Discussion: We anticipate that as this innovation becomes better known it will increasingly be adopted by traditional and non-traditional research groups to easily track their productivity and impact. Additional initiatives will be needed to standardize reporting guidelines within and between institutions.

Toutkoushian RK, Porter SR, Danielson C, Hollis PR. Using publications counts to measure an institution’s research productivity. Res High Educ. 2003;44:121–48. (PMID: 10.1023/A:1022070227966)
Greenhalgh T, Raftery J, Hanney S, Glover M. Research impact: a narrative review. Bmc Med. 2016;14(1):78. (PMID: 10.1186/s12916-016-0620-8)
Bakkalbasi N, Bauer K, Glover J, Wang L. Three options for citation tracking: Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science. Biomed Digit Libr. 2006;3:1–8. (PMID: 10.1186/1742-5581-3-7)
Citations. ResearchGate. https://explore.researchgate.net/display/support/Citations . Accessed 22 Jan 2019.
Harzing AW, Alakangas S. Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science: a longitudinal and cross-disciplinary comparison. Scientometrics. 2016;106:787–804. (PMID: 10.1007/s11192-015-1798-9)
Woods R, Chan T, Thoma B, Sherbino J. Education scholarship in Canadian emergency medicine: the past, present, and future. Can J Emerg Med. 2018;20:164–8.
Rowlands I. Creating resarch group profiles in Google scholar. Univ Leicester Libr. 2013. https://www2.le.ac.uk/library/downloads/research-services/UoL_Google_Scholar_Group_Profiles.pdf . Accessed 24 July 2018.
Chan T, Kuehl D. On lampposts, sneetches, and stars: a call to go beyond bibliometrics for determining academic value. Acad Emerg Med. 2019. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/acem.13707.

Keywords: Google Scholar; Research group; Research impact

Date Created: 20190519 Date Completed: 20200406 Latest Revision: 20230207

20260130

PMC6565647

10.1007/s40037-019-0515-4

31102192