Thanks to the many who have written expressing an interest in our recent Correspondence piece of this title in Nature (<a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7433/full/493480b.html" target="_blank">http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7433/full/493480b.html</a>,
or write to me and I will send a pdf). We've received many queries
about our methods in creating an effective collection-specific Google
Scholar profile and have written up these details (copied below).<br clear="all">
<br>Regards,<br>-- <br>Kevin Winker<br>University of Alaska Museum<br>907 Yukon Drive<br>Fairbanks, AK 99775<br><br>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-variant:small-caps">Creation of the UAM.birds Google Scholar
profile</span></b> started with the creation of a separate email account (<a href="mailto:UAM.birds@gmail.com" target="_blank">UAM.birds@gmail.com</a>). We were not able to
create an additional profile within a personal email account; the profile
offered by Google Scholar is relatively unyielding to manipulation. Hence, we basically
co-opted Google Scholar to make it think UAM birds was an individual.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span>The next
step involved populating the profile with papers that used UAM birds. This progressed
through several avenues. First, the department already had a list of papers
using UAM birds going back approximately a decade for use in NSF proposals.
These papers had been pre-vetted to ensure their use of the UAM bird collection
and could be added easily, albeit manually, by searching by lead author name in
the “add” function. Second, we searched for older papers written by the past
curator and collections manager, reasoning that their work would contain a substantial
percentage of papers using the UAM bird collection. Third, we checked the
acknowledgments and information provided in field guides and authoritative
published works on western North American birds looking for evidence of UAM
contributions. Effort was concentrated on what we considered to be more
important works rather than simply combing all possible literature (our list
may not be complete). These searches were slower and depended more heavily on institutional
knowledge. However, a number of the most heavily cited publications were found
in this way.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span>Once we
felt that we had found most of the possible citations and had added them to the
Google Scholar profile, we proofed our work. First, we downloaded them into an Excel
file using the “export” function. We then manually went through this file and categorized
publications by the method in which they had used the UAM bird collection. These
modes of use consisted of three categories: direct use of one or more UAM bird specimens,
depositing bird specimens that had been obtained in the study at UAM, or use of
the information contained in and associated with the collection. These are not
mutually exclusive categories, and many publications fell into more than one of
these use categories. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span>Google
Scholar does not have much in the way of citation quality control. It
frequently attributes authors to papers when they in fact have only some
tangential relationship to the paper. It also often has multiple citations for
the same paper. These can be merged using the “merge” function. Often the
profile will need to be sorted by “Title/Author” to get duplicates on the same
page (it doesn’t appear that you can carry a selected citation through page
changes to merge papers on different pages; it also helps to show 100 citations
per page and not 20). The bottom line is that each citation should be vetted to
make sure its inclusion is appropriate. Certain publications (e.g., 7<sup>th</sup>
edition of the AOU checklist, Phillips <i>Known
Birds of North and Middle America</i>) do not appear to be cited as much as
they should. We had to enter these manually, and although they are correctly
entered there may be enough variation in the way they are cited that Google
Scholar has a hard time recognizing all the variations.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span>We hope to
see other collections adopt this method as a way to look beyond use statistics
(e.g., loans, research visits, etc.) and gain greater understanding about how
often the products of that use are then used themselves in the larger
scientific publication enterprise. That said, while this approach has some merits,
we have to be careful in putting too much reliance on it. For example, a basic
taxonomic revision is usually cited less frequently than a paper on a popular
topic, so the scientific importance of a publication may not be measurable by
citations alone. Nevertheless, this new metric of a collection’s impact may be
useful when making a case for continuing or increasing support for collections
as important scientific infrastructure with considerable impact.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Jack Withrow and Kevin Winker</p>