Google Scholar

Search Scholar

Profiles

Google Scholar Profiles

Google Scholar Profiles provide a simple way for authors to showcase their academic publications. You can check who is citing your articles, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name, e.g., richard feynman.

Best of all, it's quick to set up and simple to maintain - even if you have written hundreds of articles, and even if your name is shared by several different scholars. You can add groups of related articles, not just one article at a time; and your citation metrics are computed and updated automatically as Google Scholar finds new citations to your work on the web. You can choose to have your list of articles updated automatically or review the updates yourself, or to manually update your articles at any time.

Set up your Google Scholar Profile

Setting up your profile

How do I create my author profile?

Start here. It's quick and free.

  1. First, sign in to your Google account, or create one if you don't yet have one. We recommend that you use a personal account, not an account at your institution, so that you can keep your profile for as long as you wish.
  2. Once you've signed in to your Google account, open the Scholar profile sign up form, confirm the spelling of your name, enter your affiliation, interests, etc. We recommend that you also enter your university email address; this would make your profile eligible for inclusion in Google Scholar search results.
  3. On the next page, you'll see groups of articles written by people with names similar to yours. Add all articles that you have written; keep in mind your articles may be in several different groups, and some groups may occasionally include articles by several different authors. If you publish under several different names, you may need to do several searches to add all your articles.
  4. Once you're done with adding articles, it will ask you what to do when the article data changes in Google Scholar. You can either have the updates applied to your profile automatically, or you can choose to review them beforehand. In either case, you can always go to your profile and make changes by hand.
  5. Finally, you will see your profile. This is a good time to add a few finishing touches - upload your professional looking photo, visit your university email inbox and click on the verification link, double check the list of articles, and, once you're completely satisfied, make your profile public. Voila - it's now eligible to appear in Google Scholar when someone searches for your name!
Some of my articles are not in my profile. How do I add missing articles?

Select the "Add articles" option from the menu. Search for your articles using titles, keywords, or your name. Your citation metrics will update immediately to account for the articles you added.

If your search doesn't find the right article, click "Add article manually". Then, type in the title, the authors, etc., and click "Save". Keep in mind that citations to manually added articles may not appear in your profile for a few days.

To add a group of related articles, click "Add article groups". If you have written articles under different names, with multiple groups of colleagues, or in different journals, you may need to select multiple groups. Your citation metrics will update immediately to account for the groups you added.

If the menu doesn't appear, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

Some of the articles in my profile aren't mine. Why are they included in my profile?

Alas, we have no way of knowing which articles are really yours. Author names are often abbreviated and different people sometimes share similar names. We use a statistical model to try to tell different authors apart but such automatic processes are not always accurate. The best way to fix this is to look through the articles in your profile and remove the ones that were written by others.

How do I remove articles that aren't mine?

Select the articles you would like to remove and then click the "Delete" button.

If the article checkboxes don't appear, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

I deleted one of the articles in my profile by mistake. How do I fix this?

Deleted articles are moved to the Trash. To view articles in the Trash, select the "View trash" option from the menu. To restore an article from the Trash, select the article and click the "Restore" button.

If the menu doesn't appear, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

The description of one of my articles isn't correct. How do I fix it?

Click the title of the article and then click the "Edit" button. When you finish your changes, click the "Save" button.

If the "Edit" button doesn't appear, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

If you've made substantial changes to the article, please keep the following in mind.

  • The list of "Scholar articles" at the bottom of the page may no longer match the article you've edited. We recommend that you review this list and "unmerge" the Scholar articles that no longer correspond to your article. Scholar articles affect the computation of your "Cited by" counts and citation metrics.
  • As with manual additions of articles, it may take several days for all citations to the edited article to be collected in your profile. You can speed up the process by adding the appropriate article from Google Scholar and then merging it with your version; then, your citation metrics will update right away.
  • It's possible that the article you've edited was already in your profile as a separate record. We recommend that you merge duplicate records - click the "Title" column header to sort your articles by title, select the checkboxes next to the duplicate entries, which should now be adjacent, and then click the "Merge" button.
My profile shows the same article twice. How do I fix this?

Select both versions of the article and click the "Merge" button. You will then see both citations for the article listed. Select the best citation to the article (you can edit it later if you wish) and click "Merge". This will merge the two versions. Your citation metrics will automatically update to count the versions you've merged as a single article, not two different articles.

If the article checkboxes don't appear, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

I merged a version with 27 citations with the one with 4 citations. How come the merged article has 30 citations - shouldn't it be 31?

Nope, the "Cited by" count after the merge is the number of papers that cite the merged article. One of these probably cites both versions that you've merged; the 27+4=31 formula counts this citation twice. But if the count has dropped below 27... ugh, please do let us know.

Why is there a next to my article's "Cited by" count?

The indicates that the "Cited by" count includes citations that might not match this article. It is an estimate made automatically by a computer program. You can check these citations by clicking on the article's title and looking for "Scholar articles" with a next to their title.

Making your profile public

Will my profile be visible to others?

Your profile is private and visible only to you until and unless you make your profile public.

How do I make my profile public?

Click the "Edit" button next to your name, check the "Make my profile public" box, and click "Save".

If the "Edit" button doesn't appear, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

How do I link to my public profile?

You can share the URL displayed by the browser. It looks like this:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ID&hl=en
…where ID identifies your Google Scholar profile. You can link to it from your homepage, email it to colleagues, or share it on social media. The link only works if the profile is public, and only lets other people see the profile but not make changes to it.

I have changed my mind about making my profile public. How do I make it private again?

Click the "Edit" button next to your name, uncheck the "Make my profile public" box, and click "Save".

If the "Edit" button doesn't appear, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

My profile is already public. Is there anything else I need to do to make it available for inclusion in Google Scholar search results?

You also need to add a verified email address at your university or institution.

To be eligible for inclusion in Google Scholar search results, your profile needs to be public and needs to have a verified email address at your university (non-institutional email addresses, such as gmail.com, hotmail.com, aol.com, yahoo.com, qq.com, etc., are not suitable for this purpose). To add a verified email to your profile, click the "Edit" button next to your name, add your email address at your institution and click "Save". We will send you an email message with a verification link. Once you click on this link, the email address will be marked verified. Your profile will now be eligible for inclusion in Google Scholar search results.

Rest assured, we will not display your email address on your public profile. Nor will we sell it, trade it, or use it to send you email unrelated to Google Scholar.

Exploring citations to your articles

How do I see the list of citations to one of my articles?

Click the "Cited by" number for the article.

How do I see the citation graph for one of my articles?

Click the title of the article.

How do I get notified about new citations to my articles?

Click the "Follow" button next to your name, check the "New citations to my articles" box, and click "Done". We'll then email you when newly published articles cite any of the works in your profile.

How do I get notified about new citations to a specific article?

Click the "Cited by" number for your article and then click the envelope icon in the left sidebar. Then we'll email you when newly published articles cite yours.

Why is the "Cited by" count for one of my articles crossed out?

Google Scholar considers this article the same as another article in your profile. We display the "Cited by" count next to both of the duplicates, but we only count them once in your citation metrics.

We recommend that you merge the duplicates - select both articles and click the "Merge" button.

I like other citation metrics. Do you plan to add the g-index or the e-index? Or maybe average citations per article?

Probably not. We compute two versions, All and Recent, of three metrics - h-index, i10-index and the total number of citations. While there's no shortage of other reasonable metrics, the incremental usefulness of adding each number generally goes down, while the user confusion generally goes up.

The number of citations to one of my articles is too low. I know of several articles citing it that are not included in the list of citations. What I can do to help fix this?

Your "Cited by" counts come from the Google Scholar index. You can change the articles in your profile, but citations to them are computed and updated automatically as we update Google Scholar.

To change the "Cited by" counts in your profile, you would need to have them updated in Google Scholar. Google Scholar generally reflects the state of the web as it is currently visible to our search robots and to the majority of users. If some of the citations to your article are not included, chances are that the citing articles are not accessible to our search robots or are formatted in ways that make it difficult for our indexing algorithms to identify their bibliographic data or references.

To fix this, you'll need to identify the specific citing articles with indexing problems and work with the publisher of these articles to make the necessary changes (see our inclusion guidelines for details). For most publishers, it usually takes 6-9 months for the changes to be reflected in Google Scholar; for very large publishers, it can take much longer.

Public Access

Many research funding agencies promote broad access to funded research by mandating that articles describing the research should be publicly available. The Public Access section of a Google Scholar profile contains the articles that are expected to be publicly available based on funding agency mandates. For each article, you can view the applicable mandates and see if it is publicly available. If the article has a publicly available version, a link marked [PDF] or [HTML] appears on the right hand side.

An article can be publicly available from several sources including its publisher, an institutional repository, a research area specific repository and others. The Google Scholar indexing system tries to include all publicly accessible versions that follow our inclusion guidelines. For your own profile, you can update the list of articles and make corrections. You can also make an article publicly available by uploading a PDF of the article to your own Google Drive.

The Public Access Mandates table presents summary statistics about public access mandates for different funding agencies. For each funding agency, you can view the level of public availability of mandated articles overall and over several recent years.

How do you figure out which agency funded my research?

The Google Scholar indexing system automatically extracts funding information from the acknowledgement sections of articles. You can see the funding acknowledgement for an article by clicking on its title on the public access page.

When does the public access mandate take effect for my paper, and what is an "embargo"?

Public access mandates usually specify that funded articles should be publicly available within a given period of time (referred to as the "embargo") after publication. You can see the embargo period for an article by clicking on its title on the public access page.

I didn't write one of the articles listed on my public access page. How do I remove it?

Your profile should only include articles that you wrote. To remove an article that you didn't write, click "REVIEW", then "MAKE A CORRECTION", select "I'm not an author of this article" from the list of options and click "DONE". The article will be removed from your public access page. It will also be deleted from your profile. If you don't see "MAKE A CORRECTION", sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

My article wasn't funded by the listed agency, how do I fix it?

Click "REVIEW", then "MAKE A CORRECTION", select "This article wasn't funded by any of these agencies" from the list of options and click "DONE". The article will be removed from your public access page. If you don't see "MAKE A CORRECTION", sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

My article isn't really covered by the listed mandate because the publication date in my profile is incorrect, how do I change it?

Click "REVIEW", then "MAKE A CORRECTION", select "This article's publication date is incorrect" from the list of options, enter the correct date and click "DONE". If the new publication date is outside the scope of the mandate, the article will be removed from your public access page. This will also update the publication date in your profile. If you don't see "MAKE A CORRECTION", sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

My coauthor was funded by the listed funding agency and not me, what should I do?

The simplest thing would be to ask your coauthor to make the article publicly available. Once the publicly available version is included in the Google Scholar index, your public access page will be automatically updated.

You can also indicate this on your public access page. To do this, click "REVIEW", then "MAKE A CORRECTION", select "I'm not the responsible author" from the list of options, select the authors that are responsible for making the article publicly available and then click "DONE". The article will then be listed in the "Recused" section on your public access page. If you don't see "MAKE A CORRECTION", sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile. Once the article is publicly available from another source, it will automatically move to the "Available" section.

Why is there a star (*) next to the "not available" count on my profile page?

The star indicates that one or more of your mandated articles is not yet publicly available and that you have recused yourself from making them available.

Why doesn't the Public Access section appear in my profile?

The Public Access section is only available for public profiles. If your profile is currently private, click the "Edit" button next to your name, check the "Make my profile public" box, and click "SAVE". If the "Edit" button doesn't appear, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

If your profile is already public and you still don't see the Public Access section, the Google Scholar indexing system has not yet identified any articles with public access mandates in your profile.

My paper is publicly available from its publisher. Why isn't it shown as publicly available on my profile?

The Google Scholar indexing system tries to include all publicly accessible versions that follow our inclusion guidelines. Please contact your publisher and ask them to make sure that the publicly available version is accessible to our search robots.

You can also make the article publicly available by uploading a PDF of the article to your own Google Drive. To do that, click the "UPLOAD PDF" button next to the article on your public access page. If you don't see the "UPLOAD PDF" button, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile. Please upload only articles that you've written and have the rights to share.

My paper is publicly available from a repository. Why isn't it shown as publicly available?

The Google Scholar indexing system tries to include all publicly accessible versions that follow our inclusion guidelines. Please contact the repository administrators and ask them to make sure that the article is accessible to our search robots.

You can also make the article publicly available by uploading a PDF of the article to your own Google Drive. To do that, click the "UPLOAD PDF" button next to the article on your public access page. If you don't see the "UPLOAD PDF" button, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile. Please upload only articles that you've written and have the rights to share.

If I upload an article to my Google Drive, will it be publicly available?

Yes, the uploaded article will be linked from your profile. It will also be eligible for inclusion in the Google Scholar index.

I accidentally uploaded the wrong article, how do I replace it?

Click on the title of the article, and then click "UPDATE PDF". Follow the prompts to upload a PDF file from your computer. The link in your profile will be updated immediately. If the original version was indexed in Google Scholar, it will be replaced in a few days.

Note, the original uploaded article will still be in the "Public research articles" folder in your Google Drive. If you wish, you can delete it from there as well. If you don't see the original article or the 'Public research articles' folder in your Google Drive, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

How do I delete an uploaded article?

Go to the "Public research articles" folder in your Google Drive, and delete the article from there. The link to the article will disappear from your profile and the Google Scholar index in a few days.

If you don't see the "Public research articles" folder or the article in question in your Google Drive, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

My account administrator has disabled public sharing and I can't upload!

This error message means that your domain's administrators have disabled public sharing through Google Drive possibly as a part of organizational policy. Please contact your domain's administrators for assistance and clarification.

Public Access Reports for Agencies

In addition to reviewing public access for all your articles, you can also view and export public access reports for individual funding agencies. You can view an agency-specific report by clicking the agency’s name on the left-hand side of the Public Access page on desktops, or by selecting the agency in the dropdown list on the top-left side of the page on mobile phones.

Funding agencies can require articles to be available at a particular repository (e.g., PubMed Central), at a group of repositories (any subject or institutional repository), or anywhere on the web. Agency-specific reports take these requirements into account. When an article is available at a suitable location, it will be linked on the right. If you don’t see the link for an available article, you can provide the link to us. For agencies that specify a particular repository, there is also a link to submit your article to that repository. You can also fix errors - remove articles, correct publication dates, or update funding information.

What happens after I provide a link?
Our indexing system will attempt to fetch and index the article. It will then verify whether the link provides a free-to-read fulltext version of the article. If the indexing and verification are successful, the article will be marked available. If either indexing or verification fails, you will see a 'FIX LINK' button next to the title of the article.
I accidentally provided an incorrect link, how do I change it?
You can update a previously provided URL at any time by clicking on the "UPDATE LINK" button next to the title of the article, and providing a new URL. Providing a new URL will restart the indexing and verification process.
Verification failed with a "couldn't fetch the URL" error, what should I do?
All provided URLs are fetched by automated software known as “crawlers”. If you see an error stating that the indexing system couldn’t fetch a URL, please check if the URL is working and doesn’t result in errors such as an HTTP 404 (file not found) or HTTP 500 (server error). If the URL is working fine on your browser, please reach out to the administrators of the website to make sure that it is accessible to our crawlers. You can point them to the Scholar inclusion guidelines.
Verification failed with a message that there's no scholarly article at the URL I provided, now what?
Our indexing system uses automated software known as “parsers” to identify the bibliographic fields (e.g., title, authors, publication date) of a scholarly article. If it is unable to identify the appropriate fields at the URL you provided, it is unable to index the article. If you see such an error, it is possible that the website hosting the URL is not configured for Scholar indexing. We recommend asking the administrators of the website to update it to follow Scholar inclusion guidelines.
The system couldn't find the fulltext of the article at the URL I provided, how do I fix it?
The Scholar indexing system uses automated software to identify whether a given web page is the fulltext version of an article. If you see an error stating that the indexing system couldn’t find the fulltext, please check the URL to make sure it doesn’t go to an abstract page or a homepage. If the URL appears as fulltext to you, it is possible that a fulltext version is not available to our crawlers. We recommend asking the administrators of the website to update it to follow Scholar inclusion guidelines.
The system couldn't find the free-to-read fulltext at the URL I provided, what can I do?
Please check whether the URL allows all users, including off-campus users, to read the fulltext of the article without logging in or other authentication. If you believe that the URL leads to a publicly available version of the article, it is possible it doesn’t include a machine-readable indication of its public availability. We recommend reaching out to the administrators of the website to make sure that it includes such indicators for free-to-read articles (e.g., via a citation_fulltext_world_readable metatag).

Updates to your profile

How do I make sure that my citation metrics and the graph of citations is kept up to date?

You don't need to do anything! Your citation metrics and citation graph will be automatically updated whenever Google Scholar is updated.

I would like my list of articles to be automatically updated. How can I do that?

Select "Configure article updates" from the menu. Choose the automatic updates setting and click "Update settings". Your profile will be automatically updated when Google Scholar is updated.

This setting only controls the updates to your list of articles. It does not control the updates to your "Cited by" counts and citation metrics - those are always updated to reflect the current state of the web.

If the menu doesn't appear, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

I have opted for automated updates. However, a recent article that I have written has not been automatically added to my profile. How can I fix this?

To add a missing article to your profile, select "Add articles" from the menu and search for it. If you can't find your article in Google Scholar, select "Add article manually" to enter its bibliographic record by hand.

If the menu doesn't appear, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

How do I stop automated updates to my profile?

Select "Configure article updates" from the menu. Choose the confirmation email setting and click "Update settings". When we identify suitable updates for your profile, we'll send you an email message so that you can review and apply the updates.

If the menu doesn't appear, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

I have edited some of the articles in my profile. How do I keep the automated updates from overriding my changes?

You don't need to do anything. Automated updates will not make changes to an article that you have edited.

Reviewing updates to your profile

Why does the updates page say that one of my articles is a duplicate entry?

This happens when the Google Scholar search index changes, and it now considers this entry a duplicate of some other article in your profile. This could happen, e.g., if the publisher re-formats their papers or fixes a typo. We recommend that you accept this suggestion. You can, of course, choose to keep duplicate entries in your profile, but only one of them will be counted towards your citation metrics.

Why does the updates page say that one of my articles is not matched in Google Scholar?

This happens when the Google Scholar search index has changed, and we have been unable to match an article in your profile with the new index. Most of the time, this is because it was considered to be a duplicate of some other article in your profile, but we weren't able to determine which one. Occasionally, the article may have been removed from Google Scholar entirely, e.g., because it's no longer available on the web, or because articles that reference it have become unavailable to our search robots.

To check if the article is a duplicate, go to your profile, click the "Title" column header to sort by title, and look for the article in question. If the same article is indeed listed multiple times, you can safely accept the suggestion to delete the unmatched entry. However, if it isn't a duplicate entry, you can choose to keep it in your profile. Though, since it is not matched in Google Scholar, its "Cited by" count will be zero.

Note that your decision to keep an unmatched entry in your profile will not reinstate the entry in Google Scholar. See the inclusion guidelines for help on including your articles in Google Scholar.

General questions

I created my profile a while ago... where is it?

It's under "My profile" on top of the page or in the side drawer. If this link shows a profile creation form, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile and try again.

How do I export articles from my profile?

Select the articles you'd like to export - or check the box next to the "Title" column header to select all articles in your profile - and click the "Export" button. Follow the prompts to download a BibTeX, EndNote, RefMan, or CSV file.

If the article checkboxes don't appear, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

How do I sort the articles in my profile by publication date?

Click the column header labeled "Year".

How do I add a link to my homepage to my profile?

Click the "Edit" button next to your name, paste the URL into the "Homepage" field, and click "Save".

If the "Edit" button doesn't appear, sign in to the Google account that you used to create your profile.

How do I fix a bad entry in the profile?

If the profile is yours, sign in to the Google account that you used to create it, and follow the instructions in the Setup section to make corrections. You can add, delete, edit, and merge articles in your own profile.

If the profile is someone else's, it's best to contact its author and ask them to make a correction.

Note that profile owners can't change their "Cited-by" counts, and that updating an article in a profile does not change it in the Google Scholar search results. To make those kinds of corrections, you usually need to talk to the article's publisher; please refer to the inclusion guidelines.