Mining Google scholar citations: An exploratory study

Abstract

The official launch of Google Scholar Citations in 2011 opens a new horizon for analyzing the citations of individual researchers with unprecedented convenience and accuracy. This paper presents one of the first exploratory studies based on the data provided by Google Scholar Citations. More specifically, we conduct a series of investigations on: i) the overall citation patterns across different disciplines; ii) the correlation among various index metrics; iii) the personal citation patterns of researchers; iv) the transformation of research topics over time. Our results suggest that Google Scholar Citations is a powerful data source for citation analysis and provides a solid basis for performing more sophisticated data mining research in the future. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.