Publish or Perish

Published 02 March 07 12:58 PM | robyn.owens 

"Publish or perish" is a phrase used to refer to the pressure that academics and other researchers feel in order to retain their current position or to obtain promotion. It's not really clear who first coined the term, although the US communications theorist and media expert Marshall McLuhan popularized the phrase and is probably largely responsible for its wide use. Certainly, it is commonly considered amongst scholars seeking attribution for their work that if you don't publish it, then you haven't done it! History is littered with examples of great discoveries attributed to those who first published the idea rather than those who first had it. And modern bibliometrics is becoming a thriving industry!

Dr Anne-Wil Harzing at the University of Melbourne provides a software program called "Publish or Perish" that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics:

  • Total number of papers
  • Total number of citations
  • Average number of citations per paper
  • Average number of citations per author
  • Average number of papers per author
  • Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
  • Egghe's g-index
  • The contemporary h-index
  • Two variations of individual h-indices
  • An analysis of the number of authors per paper.

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# David.Glance said on March 30, 2007 10:03 PM:

Slightly sensationalist I know, but it appears that Google takes a very dim view of people "Screen Scraping"

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About robyn.owens

I started my academic life doing a BSc (Hons) in Mathematics at UWA before going to Oxford to complete an MSc and a DPhil, also in Mathematics. I then spent three years in Paris at l'Université de Paris-Sud, Orsay, continuing research in mathematical analysis and going to lots of movies before returning to UWA to work as a research mathematician. I have lectured in Maths and Computer Science at UWA, as well as for short periods at Berkeley, The University of Canterbury in Christchurch, and Prince Songkla University in Thailand. My research has focussed on computer vision, including feature detection in images, 3D shape measurement, image understanding, and representation.