Literature Review Tools: Harzing's Publish or Perish Review

• John Vandivier

tldr: If you are conducting a literature review, citation analysis, or similar study, you need to stop using Google Scholar and use <a href="http://www.harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish/">Harzing's Publish or Perish.

<a href="https://scholar.google.com/">Google Scholar is quite literally the Google of academic writing. It's one of the main places, perhaps the main place, to which people go when we need to search academic literature.

It lacks some features. The key use case which drove me to Google around for something new (btw, how meta is that?) was a literature review. I searched the phrase "entangled political economy" in connection with a working paper and found my results, but I could not sort by the number of citations.

I looked around for how to do this and ended up at one of the best places for answers in life, after scripture, StackExchange. I found <a href="http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/20280/how-to-sort-google-scholar-search-results-by-number-of-citations">this helpful article in particular, and it's worth a read.

The proposed solution was simple:

  1. Download the free Publish or Parish software
  2. Install and run
  3. In about 5 minutes you will have a software layer which refers to Google Scholar underneath, but with many additional filters.
Some Notes:
  1. PoP will use Google Scholar underneath if you choose Query -> New Google Scholar Query. There are other sources also.
  2. If you access Google Scholar directly it will have \"include patents\" checked on the left. PoP doesn't include those by default.
    1. If you uncheck \"include patents\" then PoP's Papers statistic will match Google's results metric as shown in Fig 1 and 2 below.
  3.  PoP also has citations per year, publication years, citation years, and other nifty stats.
Figure 1

<img class="wp-image-5937 size-full" src="http://www.afterecon.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/entangled-political-economy.png" alt="entangled-political-economy" width="818" height="490" />

Figure 2<img class="aligncenter wp-image-5938 size-full" src="http://www.afterecon.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/pop-statistics.png" alt="pop-statistics" width="334" height="281" />