aunched Google Scholar Citations

On July 20, 2011, Google formally launched Google Scholar Citations (GSC) to provide “a simple way for scholars to keep track of citations to their articles.” Citing the fact that this represents “a new direction us,” GSC is “currently in limited launch with a small number of users,” although some researchers have been able to create profiles in the past week.

The announcement came the same day that Google co-founder and newly designated CEO Larry Page announced the closure of Google Labs in an effort to refocus corporate energies in ways more directly related toprotecting shareholder value by “prioritizing our product efforts.”

Author profiling, rising from the need to better disambiguate researchers and to better find and connect relevant researchers, has become an increasingly hot product area in the past 2 years, attracting the interests of such powerhouses as Thomson Reuters (Web of Science), Elsevier (Scopus), and Microsoft. With Google, we now have the motherlode of scholarly citation data, across the entire range of disciplines, available for author profiling and more sophisticated analysis and relevance linking.