Go home GScholar, you’re Drunk!

Posted on Posted in Publishing

I was looking at the Assemblathon2  paper in Google Scholar, lamenting the fact that it is still not properly indexed when I got to noticing something funny- the number of citations the paper has received varies depending on whose page you are looking at. 3 different pages, 3 different numbers of cites.. I wonder which is right… See the screenshots!

My page says its been cited 11 times:

MM

Shaun Jackman: only 6 times

SJ

Keith’s page says its been cited 13 times..

KB

 

 

Anybody can explain this behavior??

  • The simple explanation here is that Google’s search robots crawl at differing frequencies to different web locations for different users — This is done to make web searches faster, but they also build citation counts this way (see http://bit.ly/1cMBuuW). Some journal’s servers are more amenable to crawling than others — I recently had a paper from 2012 through Wiley which finally appeared on my Google Scholar page. For your own record, I would use the highest citation count (the citation numbers and titles from Keith’s scholar page) assuming that index was the most recently crawled.