As part of my recent conversion to using arXiv, I’ve been struck by how posting preprints arXiv synergizes incredibly well with Google Scholar. I’ve tried to make some of these points on Twitter and elsewhere, but I thought I’d try to summarize here what I see as a very powerful approach to accelerating Open Science using arXiv and several features of the Google Scholar toolkit. Part of the motivation for writing this post is that I’ve tried to make this same pitch to several of my colleagues, and was hoping to be able to point them to a coherent version of this argument, which might be of use for others as well.
A couple of preliminaries. First, the main point of this post is not about trying to convince people to post preprints to arXiv. The benefits of preprinting on arXiv are manifold (early availability of results, allowing others to build on your work sooner, prepublication feedback on your manuscript, feedback from many eyes not just 2-3 reviewers, availability of manuscript in open access format, mechanism to establish scientific priority, opportunity to publicize your work in blogs/twitter, increased duration for citations) and have been ably summarized elsewhere. This post is specifically about how one can get the most out of preprinting on arXiv by using Google Scholar tools.
Secondly, it is important to make sure people are aware of two relatively recent developments in the Google Scholar toolkit beyond the basic Google Scholar search functionality — namely, Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Updates. Google Scholar Citations allows users to build a personal profile of their publications, which draws in citation data from the Google Scholar database, allowing you to “check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics”, which also will “appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name.” While Google Scholar Citations has been around for a little over a year now, I often find that many Scientists are either not aware that it exists, or have not activated their profile yet, even though it is scarily easy to set up. Another more recent feature available for those with active Google Scholar Citations profiles is called Google Scholar Updates, a tool that can analyze “your articles (as identified in your Scholar profile), scan the entire web looking for new articles relevant to your research, and then show you the most relevant articles when you visit Scholar”. As others have commented, Google Scholar Updates provides a big step forward in sifting through the scientific literature, since it provides a tailored set of articles delivered to your browser based on your previous publication record.
With these preliminaries in mind, what I want to discuss now is how a Google Scholar plays so well with preprints on arXiv to accelerate science when done in the Open. By posting preprint to arXiv and activating your Google Scholar Citation profile, you immediately gain several advantages, including the following:
- arXiv preprints are rapidly indexed by Google Scholar (with 1-2 days in my experience) and thus can be discovered easily by others using a standard Google Scholar search.
- arXiv preprints are listed in your Google Scholar profile, so when people browse your profile for your most recent papers they will find arXiv preprints at the top of the list (e.g. see Graham Coop’s Google Scholar profile here).
- Citations to your arXiv preprints are automatically updated in your Google Scholar profile, allowing you to see who is citing your most recent work.
- References included in your arXiv preprints will be indexed by Google Scholar and linked to citations in other people’s Google Scholar profiles, allowing them to find your arXiv preprint via citations to their work.
- Inclusion of an arXiv preprint in your Google Scholar profile allows Google Scholar Updates to provide better recommendations for what you should read, which is particularly important when you are moving into a new area of research that you have not previously published on.
- [Update June 14, 2013] Once Google Scholar has indexed your preprint on arXiv it will automatically generate a set of Related Articles, which you can browse to identify previously published work related to your manuscript. This is especially useful at the preprint stage, since you can incorporate related articles you may have missed before submission or during revision.
I probably have overlooked other possible benefits of the synergy between these two technologies, since they are only dawning on me as I become more familiar with these symbiotic scholarly tools myself. What’s abundantly clear to me at this stage though is that by embracing Open Science and using arXiv together with Google Scholar puts you at a fairly substantial competitive advantage in terms of your scholarship, in ways that are simply not possible using the classical approach to publishing in biology.