Tag: Google Scholar

Rollercoaster IV: ups and downs of Google Scholar citations

Time for an update to a previous post. For the past few years, I have been using an automated process to track citations to my lab’s work on Google Scholar (details of how to set this up are at the end of this post).

Due to the nature of how Google Scholar tracks citations, it means that citations get added (hooray!) but might be removed (booo!). Using a daily scrape of the data it is possible to watch this happening. The plots below show the total citations to my papers and then a version where we only consider the net daily change.

Four years of tracking citations on Google Scholar

The general pattern is for papers to accrue citations and some do so faster than others. You can also see that the number of citations occasionally drops down. Remember that we are looking at net change here. So a decrease of one citation is masked by the addition of one citation and vice versa. Even so, you can see net daily increases and even decreases.

It’s difficult to see what is happening down at the bottom of the graph so let’s separate them out. The two plots below show the net change in citations, either on the same scale (left) or scaled to the min/max for that paper (right).

Citation tracking for individual papers

The papers are shown here ranked from the ones that accrued the most citations down to the ones that gained no citations while they were tracked. Five “new” papers began to be tracked very recently. This is because I changed the way that the data are scraped (more on this below).

The version on the right reveals a few interesting things. Firstly that there seems to be “bump days” where all of the papers get a jolt in one direction or another. This could be something internal to Google or the addition or several items which all happen to cite a bunch of my papers. The latter explanation is unlikely, given the frequency of changes seen in the whole dataset. Secondly, some papers are highly volatile with daily toggling of citation numbers. I have no idea why this may be. Two plots below demonstrate these two points. The arrow shows a “bump day”. The plot on the right shows two review papers that have volatile citation numbers.

I’m going to keep the automated tracking going. I am a big fan of Google Scholar, as I have written previously, but quoting some of the numbers makes me uneasy, knowing how unstable they are.

Note that you can use R to get aggregate Google Scholar data as I have written about previously.

How did I do it?

The analysis would not be possible without automation. I use a daemon to run a shell script everyday. This script calls a python routine which outputs the data to a file. I wrote something in Igor to load each day’s data, and crunch the numbers, and make the graphs. The details of this part are in the previous post.

I realised that I wasn’t getting all of my papers using the previous shell script. Well, this is a bit of a hack, but I changed the calls that I make to scholar.py so that I request data from several years. 

#!/bin/bash
cd /directory/for/data/
python scholar.py -c 500 --author "Sam Smith" --after=1999 --csv > g1999.csv
sleep $[ ( $RANDOM % 15 )  + 295 ]
# and so on
python scholar.py -c 500 --author "Sam Smith" --after=2019 --csv > g2019.csv
OF=all_$(date +%Y%m%d).csv
cat g*.csv > $OF
rm g*.csv

I found that I got different results for each year I made the query. My first change was to just request all years using a loop to generate the calls. This resulted in an IP ban for 24 hours! Through a bit of trial-and-error I found that reducing the queries to ten and waiting a polite amount of time between queries avoided the ban.

The hacky part was to figure out which year requests I needed to make to make sure I got most of my papers. There is probably a better way to do this!

I still don’t get every single paper and I retrieve data for a number of papers on which I am not an author – I have no idea why! I exclude the erroneous papers using the Igor program that reads all the data and plots out everything. The updated version of this code is here.

—

As described earlier I have many Rollercoaster songs in my library. This time it’s the song by Sleater-Kinney from their “The Woods” album.

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Rollercoaster III: yet more on Google Scholar

In a previous post I made a little R script to crunch Google Scholar data for a given scientist. The graphics were done in base R and looked a bit ropey. I thought I’d give the code a spring clean – it’s available here. The script is called ggScholar.R (rather than gScholar.R). Feel free to run it and raise an issue or leave a comment if you have some ideas.

I’m still learning how to get things looking how I want them using ggplot2, but this is an improvement on the base R version.

—

As described earlier I have many Rollercoaster songs in my library. This time it’s the song and album by slowcore/dream pop outfit Red House Painters.

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Rollercoaster II: more on Google Scholar citations

I’ve previously written about Google Scholar. Its usefulness and its instability. I just read a post by Jon Tennant on how to harvest Google Scholar data in R and I thought I would use his code as the basis to generate some nice plots based on Google Scholar data.

A script for R is below and can be found here. Graphics are base R but do the job.

First of all I took it for a spin on my own data. The outputs are shown here:

These were the most interesting plots that sprang to mind. First is a ranked citation plot which also shows y=x to find the Hirsch number. Second, was to look at total citations per year to all papers over time. Google Scholar shows the last few years of this plot in the profile page. Third, older papers accrue more citations, but how does this look for all papers? Finally, a prediction of what my H-index will do over time (no prizes for guessing that it will go up!). As Jon noted, the calculation comes from this paper.

While that’s interesting, we need to get  the data of a scholar with a huge number of papers and citations. Here is George Church.

At the time of writing he has 763 papers with over 90,000 citations in total and a H-index of 147. Interestingly ~10% of his total citations come from a monster paper in PNAS with Wally Gilbert in the mid 80s on genome sequencing.

Feel free to grab/fork this code and have a play yourself. If you have other ideas for plots or calculations, add a comment here or an issue at GitHub.

if(!require(scholar)){
     install.packages("scholar")
}
library(scholar)
# Add Google Scholar ID of interest here
ID <- ""
# If you didn't add one to the script prompt user to add one
if(ID == ""){
     ID <- readline(prompt="Enter Scholar ID: ")
}
# Get the citation history
citeByYear<-get_citation_history(ID)
# Get profile information
profile <- get_profile(ID)
# Get publications and save as a csv
pubs <- get_publications(ID)
write.csv(pubs, file = "citations.csv")
# Predict h-index
hIndex <- predict_h_index(ID)
# Now make some plots
# Plot of total citations by year
png(file = "citationsByYear.png")
plot(citeByYear$year,citeByYear$cites,
     type="h", xlab="Year", ylab = "Total Cites")
dev.off()
# Plot of ranked paper by citation with h
png(file = "citationsAndH.png")
plot(pubs$cites, type="l",
     xlab="Paper rank", ylab = "Citations per paper")
abline(0,1)
text(nrow(pubs),max(pubs$cites, na.rm = TRUE),
     profile$h_index)
dev.off()
# Plot of cites to paper by year
png(file = "citesByYear.png")
plot(pubs$year, pubs$cites,
     xlab="Year", ylab = "Citations per paper")
dev.off()
# Plot of h-index prediction
thisYear <- as.integer(format(Sys.Date(), "%Y"))
png(file = "hPred.png")
     plot(hIndex$years_ahead+thisYear,hIndex$h_index,
     ylim = c(0, max(hIndex$h_index, na.rm = TRUE)),
     type = "h",
     xlab="Year", ylab = "H-index prediction") 
dev.off()

Note that my previous code used a python script to grab Google Scholar data. While that script worked well, the scholar package for R seems a lot more reliable.

—

I have a surprising number of tracks in my library with Rollercoaster in the title. This time I will go with the Jesus & Mary Chain track from Honey’s Dead.

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