Publish or Perish app

Introduction

After doing some research using Scopus and WoS, now it’s my turn to show you some world of wonder using free indexing services like Google Scholar (GS) and Microsoft Academic (MSA) using ‘Publish or Perish’ app.

Didn’t publish so perished (image credit: CartoonStock.com)

How to download

‘Publish or Perish’ (PoP) is a kind of GS and MSA ‘client’. Initially, It was written for Windows, but no worries for you Linux and Mac user out there. The author has made it to run under Linux or Mac emulator. You will need to install Wine or PlayonMac for Mac users, and PlayonLinux for Linux user. Here’s how: Linux, Mac, and Windows.

How it works

Basically, PoP taps GS data by default, but now it can also tap Microsoft Academic (MSA) data. You just have to subscribe to MSA free API. Here’s how.

You can entry your queries based on:

• Authors
• Publication/journal
• And keywords

Here’s a clean view of PoP interface

Here’s a snapshot when I did a query

How to analyse the results

Save the search results

PoP lets you analyse the search results in various ways. First you have to save the search results. PoP provides various saving formats: bibtex, csv, RIS, EndNote, ISI. The first two are my favorite as they can play nicely in almost all reference manager.

Load it in your reference manager

Before make further analysis, I recommend you to load the *.csv and *.bib files to your favorite reference manager (I use Zotero by the way).

Plotting

Plotting is one of the basic analysis that you can do. You can plot the citation in time, or number of docs in time. The following is my trials using R.

Histogram plot of my publication based on GS data

Histogram plot of papers on ‘diarrhoea and water quality’ based on Scopus data

Histogram plot of papers written (as author or co-author) by Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) staffs (limited to 1000 results)

Network visualisation

This is the thing of this century. There many free apps that can do it for you, for instance: VosViewer and CitNetExplorer. Both apps were written by researchers from Leiden University The Netherlands. VosViewer can visualise the keywords and co-authorship of your paper library and CitNetExplorer can construct the citation network.

An example of citation network visualisation using CitNetExplorer

An example of keyword visualisation using VosViewer

Useful readings

• Anne-Wil Harzing: Compete or cooperate: does it depend on the language? link
• Anne-Wil Harzing: Publish or Perish General Search — a Swiss Army Knife? link
• Anne-Wil Harzing: Using Publish or Perish to do a literature review link
• Anne-Wil Harzing: Google Scholar is a serious alternative to Web of Science link
• Anne-Wil Harzing: Publish or Perish: Realising Google Scholar’s potential to democratise citation analysis link
• Anne-Wil Harzing: Publish or Perish: How to conduct searches with Microsoft Academic link