Evaluation based on scientific publishing: Publish or Perish

Publish or Perish

Publish or Perish (PoP) is a software program that retrieves and analyzes citations based on the data of  Google Scholar. The program can be freely downloaded at the homepage of Anne-Wil Harzingin and it is available for Windows and Linux. The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard for pasting into other applications e.g. excel. PoP handbook is available ihttp://www.harzing.com/popbook.htm .

The output of Publish or Perish should not be compared with the output of Web of Science or Scopus which are databases for searching scientific citations. Instead the PoP output reflects more societal impact of publications.

PoP can used for evaluation of authors or journals but with keeping in mind the undefined contents of Google Scholar. PoP user interface contains also some limitations. There is no subject menu to limit the results. Also serious searches by afflilitation are not possible.  Self-citations must be excluded manually if needed. When searhing by author name it is recommended to use quotation marks. When searching several authors it is not possible to use and operator. Instead the search clause can be in form "A Harzing" "NG Noorderhaven".

Metrics
PoP counts e.g.

  • Total number of papers
  • Total number of citations
  • Average number of citations per paper
  • Average number of citations per author a
  • Average number of citations per author per year
  • Average number of papers per author
  • Average number of authors per paper
  • Hirsch's h-index