Google Scholar Author Citation Tracker: is it too little, too late?

Seven years after the release of Google Scholar in 2004, it was enhanced by a new module, the Google Scholar Author Citation Tracker (GSACT), currently a small subset of the complete Google Scholar (GS) database. It allows registered users to create and edit their scientific profiles which consist of personal data (name, affiliation, disciplinary topics of interest), a bibliography (automatically produced from a cleaned-up result list of GS), and some bibliometric indicators, such as the h-index, total citation counts, and the i10 index (the number of the author's publications that received at least ten citations).

These metrics are provided for the entire academic career of authors and for the most recent five-year period. The new module also offers some long overdue essential options, such as sorting result lists of the documents by their publication year, title, and the citations received (the default ranking/sorting choice in GSACT, not the same as the mystic ranking algorithm used in Google Scholar).

This module was tested in its short, four-month beta phase and also at the official launch to determine how it compares to the raw bibliographic data, and the publication and citation counts reported in the result list of the complete Google Scholar service for author name searches. Although the number of authors covered by the new service of Google Scholar was less than 10,000 according to a re-test of GSACT following its official launch, the preliminary results look encouraging, especially because of the remarkable clean-up of records in the samples tested, and of the involvement of registered users who can correct errors found in their scholarly profiles, add records missed by the crawlers, merge the scattered entries and aggregate their citations under a single correct entry.

In competition with the free, very much improved release of Microsoft's Academic Search service and with the services for subscribers of Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, it is expected that due to the in-house clean-up along with the editing work by the registered authors, the size of the database will increase to millions of scholarly authors, and provide better bibliographic data, far more realistic and reliable publication and citation data and a limited set of bibliometric indicators - at least at the author level - directly and conveniently from GS.