Visibility and Ethical Considerations of Pakistani Universities Researchers on Google Scholar

Abstract

Maximizing visibility by using academic profiling sites is very crucial in the academic world to improve the readership of research papers published and constant evaluation of research quality. In this article, the authors focused on the visibility of Pakistani University scholars on Google Scholar (GS). An intelligent Web Bot (MAKGBOT) was developed to collect the scholarly data of all Pakistani scholars, whose data is publicly available on Google Scholar. The findings of this research show that 87% of Pakistani universities have a presence on Google Scholar. It analyzes the research performance of scholars based on the last five years’ data from 2016 to 2020. Furthermore, the analysis reports the level of scholarly activities of all provinces and autonomous areas of Pakistan. This paper concludes by discussing the ethical issue of misrepresentation of information on the public profile and its consequences on the rankings of legitimate scholars.