As someone with an affinity for data, and having written a book called Managing Your Brand, I tend to follow metrics, especially those relating to my scholarly output. I focus on Google Scholar, though there are other options. This is just the one follow most closely. I’ve had a Google Scholar profile for several years and use it to track which of my works are being cited and what my overall citation counts are.

This isn’t a set it and forget it situation. I’ve given workshops on this topic and show examples of profiles which contain works by multiple people with the same name. Once you set up a profile the system tries to find all your works and pull them together. Sometimes it brings in works by someone with the same name or initials. You do have the option of manually adding and deleting items. At one point my profile included a book that I had written a review of; it was attributing the actual book, not the review, to me. I had to manually delete that. It didn’t always pick up published conference proceedings, book chapters, or articles in smaller publications, so I manually added those. Once they are added the system will look for citations to them.

I have a habit, that I should break, of using the same title for article that I used for the conference talk it is based on. Thus sometimes both items will appear but with a note that citations to them are included under one of the items only. I’ve had reviews for the same book appear in two different entries, but there was a way to combine them. The benefit of this was an increased h-index.

An h-index is an indication of the intersection between how many publications are cited and how often they are cited. For example, if you have published three articles, one cited 100 times, one cited twice, and the last cited only once, your h-index is 2. You’ve had two articles cited two times. To increase you h-index you would need all three articles to be cited three times. For most people in the humanities the likelihood of all their publications being cited is slim. I think having half of one’s works cited is a good showing. I don’t have any empirical research to back that up; it’s just an impression. That this happens to be about the percentage of my works that are cited is purely coincidental. Some of the work that required the most effort and that I am most proud of has never been cited at all (that I know of), while other items that required much less effort are cited fairly often. A lot of it just depends on timing, which we have no control over.

I track my profile on a regular basis, often weekly, sometimes monthly or longer. I keep a tab on my web browser open to it and just hit refresh. Every six months I add new citations to a refworks file. It includes citations in a number of languages and is lengthy enough to look impressive. Just the statistics on my profile is handy to have for things like reappointment or promotion packets or annual reports, and so on. Having my citation numbers handy allows me to include them in brief biographical statements if that seems appropriate. I do keep some spreadsheets so I can see how things are cited over time. Google Scholar includes a chart showing how many overall citations there are to works in a profile, the h-index, and the i10 index (how many items have been cited 10 times). It also provides the same statistics for the last five years. Thus every January the numbers for the most recent five years reset, dropping off a year and adding the new one. It means your most recent five years’ numbers decrease at the start of the year and then grow throughout the year. The overall numbers don’t decrease for this reason and just continue to grow.

Or so you might think, but the numbers are actually fluid. This year the citation number for one of my articles has gone up and down by one on a regular basis. I didn’t check but I think the same item was added and deleted and added and deleted, etc. I don’t know why but this is my guess. Other numbers go up and down with less frequency but sometimes in greater mass. My highest cited article lost six citations in 2024. There were some duplicates in the citations and I think the system might have finally caught up with that. I can’t manually add or delete works that cite mine, but only watch the numbers go up and down. Sometimes theses and dissertations that were publicly available become more difficult to find, lost in the folder structure of institutional repositories. It is also possible that the articles were spam or inauthentic publications and thus deleted from the citations to my works.

This year some peculiar things happened. The earliest citations to my works disappeared. I can see a year by year chart and the two earliest years just aren’t there anymore. It is possible that these works disappeared from the system or the chart just doesn’t show anything that old anymore. A parallel oddity is that an early citation from 2025 has also disappeared. So both my earliest and most recent citations have disappeared. I find it somewhat distressing that we are more than halfway through the year and I have no citations from 2025. I’ve had years with as few as five but never a year without any. The year isn’t over yet so there is hope. In the last few years I’ve done more book chapters than books or articles and that could be a factor as those are often cited less. We shall see what the rest of 2025 holds. Perhaps 2026 will be a better year.

If you are interested in learning more about Google Scholar there is a good wikipedia article outlining its development and history. Google also maintains a blog on Google Scholar (or at least I think it has an official connection) that provides information on system updates.

In any event, if you publish I encourage you to track your citations, either through Google Scholar or one of the other systems that provide similar data (Web of Science, etc).