Finding influential papers using Google Scholar Metrics

July 30, 2019 5:11 AM

Google Scholar metrics have been released for the last five years. I can view papers ranked by category, or see the most influential papers in a specific journal. Is there a way to see the "greatest hits" regardless of category?

For example, how would I see a list of the most to least influential papers regardless of discipline?

Thank you.

posted by mecran01 to Education (5 answers total)

Response by poster: Google Scholar Metrics announcement
posted by mecran01 at 5:12 AM on July 30, 2019

Probably not, because Google Scholar metrics are based on citation numbers, and citation practices are so different in different fields that it would be difficult or maybe impossible to use them to say whether a biology paper was more influential than a philosophy paper.
posted by escabeche at 5:24 AM on July 30, 2019 [5 favorites]

I would also be very wary of trusting google scholar numbers in general; their system is largely automated and there is no ability to fix some particular errors. (For me, it conflates two of my papers; there is no way to make it disambiguate. The error is due to misparsing of equations in the titles, which isn’t going to be a problem in many other fields).
posted by nat at 5:44 AM on July 30, 2019

Forgive me if this is something you already know about, but there is a whole field of study called bibliometrics that uses a wide range of statistical methods to examine the influence of publications. There is a ton to dig into if you find bibliometrics interesting, but there really isn't a universally agreed-upon metric for article-level influence even within many fields, much less across disciplines.
posted by Rock Steady at 7:53 AM on July 30, 2019

Response by poster: I am not so much concerned about the accuracy of Google metrics. I just wanted to skim the top X papers for the last five years to find good stuff to read. Thanks. Like a version of SSRN that isn't owned by Pearson.
posted by mecran01 at 9:28 PM on July 31, 2019