In which we track citations to their lair (or don't)

Mark Bauerlein counted citations by using Google Scholar, which he argues is the "best instrument" (9) for tracking citations in humanities fields (for which there are currently no reliable references at all).  This strikes me as not, perhaps, the best method.  To explain why, I'll use myself as an example.

Problem #1: The existence of one's articles in the MLA database. 

Four of my articles are nowhere to be found.  (You can see a full list of my main publications on this blog's "about" page.)  One of them is intended for use by acquisitions librarians (the bibliography I did for Choice), not for scholarship per se, although I've come across at least one person citing it as such.  Three others that are nowhere to be found in the database: Grace Aguilar, Emily Sarah Holt, and Anne Boleyn.  The first two are in book collections; the last is in a journal that the MLA indexes in theory, but apparently not in practice.

For obvious reasons, it's hard to cite something if you don't know it's there, although a couple of people have stumbled over Grace and Anne. All of the articles missing from the  MLA are present in other online indexes, however. 

Problem #2: Using Google Scholar to find citations.

Although Google Scholar pulled two citations of my work from Project Muse, it missed the one in JSTOR.  It also missed a citation in PQ and, more importantly, something on the order of eleven or twelve book citations.  This is a rather large margin of error.  (There are also some dissertations that don't get pulled up on Google Scholar.)  Bear in mind that I'm simply counting, not evaluating the quality of the citation, or how my work was  used. 

To track citations of my work, I have to do the following:

1) Check Project Muse, JSTOR, Academic Search Complete, Humanities International Complete, and the Taylor & Francis Archive--directly.  All of these searches pull up overlapping but different results (not all of them appearing in Google Scholar). 

2) Check Google Scholar.

3) Check GoogleBooks.

4) Check Amazon's  and Amazon.co.uk's  "search inside the book feature" (this doesn't work very well).

5) Check Google.

Moreover, if I'm tracking myself by name, I have to run the following searches:

Miriam Elizabeth Burstein (I normally publish using my full name)

Miriam Burstein (because people sometimes just ignore the middle name)

M. E. Burstein (because house style occasionally mandates initials)

Miriam Burnstein or Miriam Elizabeth Burnstein (yes, there are multiple citations out there  with my last name misspelled; when I tell people that I use my middle name because "it's the only one people can spell correctly," I'm not entirely joking)

Burstein, Miriam

This is all for one person!

Moreover, all of this presumes digitization.  Many humanities journals just aren't available through either JSTOR or Project Muse, or can't be searched without a subscription.   Books are similarly subject to the vagaries of their publishers, as they may be unsearchable in GoogleBooks, and Amazon's search engine does an apparently random job of doing keyword searches in books with "search inside the book" enabled (it will pull up a handful of books in which I'm cited, but miss many others, even if the book itself can be searched once you've loaded it into the viewer). 

 

Comments

[Sarah Ficke]

Thanks for posting this! I read that article, and I was skeptical about how effective that kind of search would be.

[Heide]

If you let the MLA know that one of your articles is missing, and provide them with a copy, they'll index it.

[Rosemary Feal]

Yes, indeed. Let us know what's missing. Rosemary Feal, 'MLA

[bibliolathas]

And if your name is shared with - even spelled identically to - someone insanely productive, you will find yourself buried by Google scholar citation and spend some time trying to persuade it that you are a small-time classicist in Australia rather than a big-time fertility researcher in Washington.

[a librarian]

Hello, I stumbled across this from Twitter, and I'm interested because I'm an academic humanities librarian who tracks her own cites and also works with faculty.

Have you tried the advanced search in Google Scholar? I did, using your name in quotes as the author, and got these results:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&q=author:%22Miriam+Burstein%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,38

Google Scholar here does list the Grace Aquilar, Anne Boleyn, and Choice articles.

Another search for the title of your Holt chapter turns up the book and your article, though your name isn't listed:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22emily+sarah+holt+and+the+evangelical+historical+novel%22&btnG=Search&as_sdt=0%2C38&as_ylo=&as_vis=0

The citation counts may not be perfect, however.

For my own cites, I use Google Scholar (which seems to find the most), Web of Science (which does index some humanities journals), and plain old web searches. One thing that's really great about the new Citations feature in Google Scholar: it sends you alerts when your work is cited. I got one such alert just the other day, and it was great.

[Miriam]

AL: Those are identical to the results I got.

Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt checked himself out, and reports a) a dearth of citations from European journals (which is where his work mostly gets cited--his field skews heavily Continental in makeup), b) a book being cited thirty years before it actually existed ("really rather unlikely..."), c) and, in general, clusters of citations from about five years ago, but boatloads of missing citations from, say, the 80s.

[anthony]

I tried to get the Anne Boylen paper via google, and jstor, i got the cite, but the paper itself was not indexed.

[Kim]

One big advantage to Brockport's new Digital Commons is the fact that it sends you monthly download reports of any articles you and your publishers allow to be published in the IR. More downloads mean more citations!