It’s no great secret that many of us here at ProfHacker are heavy users of All Things Google. One of the services I particularly like is Google Scholar; I find it a good starting point for literature searches, and appreciate the ability to set up alerts. Plus, Zotero works very well with it.
A few weeks ago, Google introduced a service that should make Scholar even more useful: Google Scholar Citations. It provides a very handy way to keep track of citations to your work, and you have a fair amount of control over how it handles your work---including the ability to edit and add works manually. (This is good, since the service is far from perfect yet; I can see that I’m going to have to correct an entry or two and add a couple manually.)
Once your publications are added, your profile will look something like the sample below:
As you can see, you get a graph of your citation metrics, and a nicely-formatted list of your publications. Clicking on a number in the “Cited by” column brings up a list of articles that cite that particular work---so you can readily see not only how often your work is being cited, but also by whom. Very handy.
At the moment, Google Scholar Citations is in a limited launch and is not accepting new users, though you can sign up to be notified when it’s more widely available.
If you’ve had the chance to experiment with Google Scholar Citations, please share your impressions in the comments.
[Lead image: Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by nirak. Image in body of post: Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by ajc1]