Playing with Google Scholar Profile

Now I know I am academic related staff, but because I am a statistician for a while I have quite often been a minor author on a number of academic papers. There is advantages to this for the other authors, the statistical reviewers are far less likely to decide to pick a fight over statistical niceties if they know you have consulted a statistician and if a statistician is there as an author then that is clearly the case. Well I can think of at least one case where I have had to redo tables because although the authors used me for the statistical analysis which was all carefully adjusted, they then went and produced the tables from the raw data without any adjustment.

Well a few weeks ago I found out that Google now has Google Scholar profile. This actually keeps tabs on the times the papers are cited. So I decided to have a play and see what I could turn up.  I am using my work email, which is NOT recommended by Google as Academics move around and Universities tend to close email account when staff leave. Remember I am academic related, not an academic and that therefore I am not into playing the same games as most Academics, really my performance is not assessed by my citation index. Secondly, when I am doing my own research it rarely has any relationship to any of my papers. I suspect I will have to at some stage put together my other research papers but as at present they are exactly one in a very small journal I am in no hurry.

So what do I get, well you can view my Citation Profile which will give you an idea of the papers I have written and yes I really am second author on that first paper. It was my first ever paper and I was a very junior statistician who happened to be good at writing databases. That study need ongoing statistical and database support so I was allocated by my boss. It also was very much a one person team and A Webb really is the sole researcher.

Now here is a couple of niceties, when I go onto Google Scholar and am logged in on that account I get the following screen:

Google Scholar page

Now there are some things you should note firstly the bit that says "New! Scholar Updates Recommended articles for you" which links to this entry on the Google Scholar blog and secondly the "My Updates" at the top which actually links to a list of papers I might be interested in see:

Now I do not mind showing you this, it will not tell you anything about my research interests and it should be unfocussed, as I work with a number of research teams. I really can't seem myself using this regularly although I must admit I can see some areas of interest in some of the studies which one research group I work with may develop. However I suspect when the next paper is out, things will change again as it suddenly starts thinking I am working in another direction. However if I was an established researcher in a single field it might well be a way to keep up to date with who is working in my field.