Publish or Perish

Are you applying for tenure, promotion or a new job? Do you need to prepare for your performance appraisal? Publish or Perish is designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage, even if you have very few citations. You can also use it to decide which journals to submit to, to prepare for a job interview, to do a literature review, to do bibliometric research, to write laudatios or obituaries, or to do some homework before meeting your academic hero. Publish or Perish is a real Swiss army knife.

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Details about new PoP versions

Training resources by Anne-Wil Harzing

Watch an interview on the Publish or Perish software

Multilingual training resources by members of the PoP user community

As someone doing research into language diversity I know only too well how the use of English can be a barrier for those with different mother tongues. I am therefore delighted that members of the PoP community have been creating training videos in their own languages.

The resources below are of varying quality and provided for your convenience only; I do not guarantee 100% accuracy. As non-native speakers of English might find videos with a specific type of English accent easier to follow, I also list videos in English with non-native accents.

The listing is by recency, with most recent videos listed at the top. Earlier videos will be using an older version of the software, but might still be useful for a quick introduction in your language. Have you recently created training for Publish or Perish? Please let me know and I'll list it here.

Have you recently created training for Publish or Perish? Please let me know and I'll list it here.

How to cite the Publish or Perish software

If you are using the Publish or Perish software in one of your research articles or otherwise want to refer to it, please use the following format:

Harzing, A.W. (2007) Publish or Perish, available from https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish

About Publish or Perish

Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses a variety of data sources (incl. Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search) to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following metrics:

Total number of papers and total number of citations

Average citations per paper, citations per author, papers per author, and citations per year

Hirsch's h-index and related parameters

Egghe's g-index

The contemporary h-index

Three variations of individual h-indices

The average annual increase in the individual h-index

The age-weighted citation rate

An analysis of the number of authors per paper.

The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard (for pasting into other applications) or saved to a variety of output formats (for future reference or further analysis). Publish or Perish includes a detailed help file with search tips and additional information about the citation metrics.

What Publish or Perish is for

Publish or Perish is designed to empower individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage. We would be concerned if it would be used for academic staff evaluation purposes in a mechanistic way.

When using Publish or Perish for citation analyses, we would like to suggest the following general rule of thumb:

If an academic shows good citation metrics, it is very likely that he or she has made a significant impact on the field.

However, the reverse is not necessarily true. If an academic shows weak citation metrics, this may be caused by a lack of impact on the field, but also by one or more of the following:

Working in a small field (therefore generating fewer citations in total);

Publishing in a language other than English (LOTE - effectively also restricting the citation field);

Publishing mainly (in) books.

Although data sources such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic perform better than the Web of Science and Scopus in this respect, they are still not very good in capturing LOTE articles and citations, or citations in books or book chapters. As a result, citation metrics in the Social Sciences and even more so in the Humanities will always be underestimated as in these disciplines publications in LOTE and books/book chapters are more likely than in the Sciences.

Metrics

In addition to the various simple statistics (number of papers, number of citations, and others), Publish or Perish calculates the following citation metrics (see Citation metrics in the online help file for more details):

Hirsch's h-index Proposed by J.E. Hirsch in his paper An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output, arXiv:physics/0508025 v5 29 Sep 2005. It aims to provide a robust single-number metric of an academic's impact, combining quality with quantity. Egghe's g-index Proposed by Leo Egghe in his paper Theory and practice of the g-index, Scientometrics, Vol. 69, No 1 (2006), pp. 131-152. It aims to improve on the h-index by giving more weight to highly-cited articles. Zhang's e-index Publish or Perish also calculates the e-index as proposed by Chun-Ting Zhang in his paper The e-index, complementing the h-index for excess citations, PLoS ONE, Vol 5, Issue 5 (May 2009), e5429. The e-index is the (square root) of the surplus of citations in the h-set beyond h2, i.e., beyond the theoretical minimum required to obtain a h-index of 'h'. The aim of the e-index is to differentiate between scientists with similar h-indices but different citation patterns. Contemporary h-index Proposed by Antonis Sidiropoulos, Dimitrios Katsaros, and Yannis Manolopoulos in their paper Generalized h-index for disclosing latent facts in citation networks, arXiv:cs.DL/0607066 v1 13 Jul 2006. It aims to improve on the h-index by giving more weight to recent articles, thus rewarding academics who maintain a steady level of activity. Age-weighted citation rate (AWCR) and AW-index The AWCR measures the average number of citations to an entire body of work, adjusted for the age of each individual paper. It was inspired by Bihui Jin's note The AR-index: complementing the h-index, ISSI Newsletter, 2007, 3(1), p. 6. The Publish or Perish implementation differs from Jin's definition in that we sum over all papers instead of only the h-core papers. Individual h-index (original) The Individual h-index was proposed by Pablo D. Batista, Monica G. Campiteli, Osame Kinouchi, and Alexandre S. Martinez in their paper Is it possible to compare researchers with different scientific interests?, Scientometrics, Vol 68, No. 1 (2006), pp. 179-189. It divides the standard h-index by the average number of authors in the articles that contribute to the h-index, in order to reduce the effects of co-authorship. Individual h-index (PoP variation) Publish or Perish also implements an alternative individual h-index called hI,norm that takes a different approach: instead of dividing the total h-index, it first normalizes the number of citations for each paper by dividing the number of citations by the number of authors for that paper, then calculates the h-index of the normalized citation counts. This approach is much more fine-grained than Batista et al.'s; we believe that it more accurately accounts for any co-authorship effects that might be present and that it is a better approximation of the per-author impact, which is what the original h-index set out to provide. Multi-authored h-index A further h-like index is due to Michael Schreiber and first described in his paper To share the fame in a fair way, h m modifies h for multi-authored manuscripts, New Journal of Physics, Vol 10 (2008), 040201-1-8. Schreiber's method uses fractional paper counts instead of reduced citation counts to account for shared authorship of papers, and then determines the multi-authored h m index based on the resulting effective rank of the papers using undiluted citation counts. Average annual increase in the individual h-index As of release 4.3 Publish or Perish also calculates the average annual increase in hI,norm, called hI,annual. This average annual increase in the individual h-index is useful for the following reasons: In common with the hI,norm index, it removes to a considerable extent any discipline-specific publication and citation patterns that otherwise distort the h-index.

index, it removes to a considerable extent any discipline-specific publication and citation patterns that otherwise distort the h-index. It also reduces the effect of career length and provides a fairer comparison between junior and senior researchers. The hI,annual is meant as an indicator of an individual's average annual research impact, as opposed to the lifetime score that is given by the h-index or hI,norm.

Download and install Publish or Perish

The Publish or Perish software is available as Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS applications; the Windows version can also be installed and used on GNU/Linux computers with the aid of a suitable emulator such as CrossOver Linux or Wine.

Publish or Perish on Microsoft Windows

Download and installation instructions

Publish or Perish on macOS

Download and installation instructions

Publish or Perish on GNU/Linux

Download and installation instructions

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Support Publish or Perish

The development of the Publish or Perish software is a volunteering effort that has been ongoing since 2006. Download and use of Publish or Perish is and will remain free (gratis), but your support toward the costs of hosting, bandwidth, and software development are appreciated. Your support helps further development of Publish or Perish for new data sources and additional features.

Note: all prices are in Pounds Sterling (GBP). For UK and EU customers, VAT at the local rate is included in the price.