Analysis of the profiles of researchers from Panama and Google Scholar bibliometric indicators

Abstract

The objective of this article is to evaluate the visibility of researchers in Panama and the impact of their pub-lications using bibliometric indicators including h-index, i10index and profile citations in Google Scholar Citations (GSC) categorized by gender, institution, and SNI membership. For automatic data collection in GSC we created an algorithm in the R language which extracted 860 profiles from 47 institutions. 25.5% of the profiles had no citation accounting, and 29.5% had an h-index over 5. Of the 14530 studies extracted from the profiles, 49.3% have been cited once, generating 287616 citations. 62% of citations are from studies by 28 researchers. There is visibility for Panamanian researchers in GSC, but only 3.3% provide 62% of citations, with little impact in publications and indexing errors. This suggests a need to create institutional policies to normalize profile creation.