Software: Publish or Perish Citations - Empowering Academics?

Publish or Perish is designed to empower individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage. We would be concerned if it would be used for academic staff evaluation purposes in a mechanistic way.

Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics:

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• Total number of papers
• Total number of citations
• Average number of citations per paper
• Average number of citations per author
• Average number of papers per author
• Average number of citations per year
• Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
• Egghe's g-index
• The contemporary h-index
• The age-weighted citation rate
• Two variations of individual h-indices
• An analysis of the number of authors per paper.

The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard (for pasting into other applications) or saved to a variety of output formats (for future reference or further analysis). Publish or Perish includes a detailed help file with search tips and additional information about the citation metrics. Anne-Wil Harzing welcomes user feedback to help her improve the program.

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When using Publish or Perish for citation analyses, we would like to suggest the following general rule of thumb:

• If an academic shows good citation metrics, it is very likely that he or she has made a significant impact on the field.

However, the reverse is not necessarily true. If an academic shows weak citation metrics, this may be caused by a lack of impact on the field, but also by one or more of the following:

• Working in a small field (therefore generating fewer citations in total);
• Publishing in a language other than English (LOTE - effectively also restricting the citation field);
• Publishing mainly (in) books.

Although Google Scholar performs better than the Web of Science in this respect, it is still not very good in capturing LOTE articles and citations, or citations in books or book chapters. As a result, citation metrics in the Social Sciences and even more so in the Humanities will always be underestimate