Writers’ Lab: Setting Up and Maintaining your Google Scholar Profile

As an academic, you might be totally focused on searching for articles in Scopus, and checking your h-index in Scopus as well – provided that your institution has a subscription.

However, many students and scholars these days use Google Scholar. You might be familiar with this search engine and you might have used it for a search when you were off your institution’s network. You can improve your search with the these tips.

Besides being publicly available, Google Scholar has another advantage: you can set up your author profile.

And, if you haven’t set up your profile – go there and do so immediately. Having an author profile is as important as having your articles showing up in a search on Google Scholar.

Setting up your Google Scholar profile is very easy. If you need a tutorial, go here.

This is what my profile looks like:

Here are a few elements that you need to keep in mind when setting up your Google Scholar profile:

• You need to use your institution’s email address.
• Don’t forget to add some keywords that summarize your field of research.
• Make your profile public – it’s a great way of reaching out to follow researchers.

Keep in mind that you need to use an academic email address and make your profile public if you want to show up in search results.

An interesting feature of Google Scholar is that you have the possibility to add publications.
That conference paper that Scopus didn’t pick up because it wasn’t printed by a big publisher – add it to your Google Scholar profile.
Your research reports – add them to your Google Scholar profile!

If you keep a profile on ResearchGate, or you submit all your publications to the repository of your institution, Google Scholar will fetch this information and add these publications to your profile.

As you can add more documents to your Google Scholar profile, you might see a difference in their result for your h-index as compared to the “official” Scopus result.
Just keep in mind that Google Scholar, as useful as it is, is not the place to check you h-index.

Finally, as with every profile online, make sure you maintain your Google Scholar profile. If an article shows up twice in the list, merge the articles into one. Visit your profile every now and then to see if everything still looks as supposed to.
Typically, you can sit back and relax, as Google will automatically update your profile as your publications appear online.

Have you set up your Google Scholar profile yet?