Improvements in Google Scholar Citations are for the summer: creating an institutional affiliation link feature

TL;DR

This paper evaluates Google's new institutional affiliation link feature in Google Scholar Citations, highlighting its strengths and shortcomings, and offers suggestions for improvement to enhance accuracy and global applicability.

Contribution

The study provides an assessment of the coverage, precision, and issues of Google's institutional affiliation feature, proposing enhancements for better worldwide utility.

Findings

The feature works well for many institutions, especially Anglo-Saxon universities.

There are notable inaccuracies and inconsistencies, particularly with certain institutions.

Suggestions are made to improve the feature's accuracy and global coverage.

Abstract

This report describes the feature introduced by Google to provide standardized access to institutional affiliations within Google Scholar Citations. First, this new tool is described, pointing out its main characteristics and functioning. Next, the coverage and precision of the tool are evaluated. Two special cases (Google Inc. and Spanish Universities) are briefly treated with the purpose of illustrating some aspects about the accuracy of the tool for the task of gathering authors within their appropriate institution. Finally, some inconsistencies, errors and malfunctioning are identified, categorized and described. The report finishes by providing some suggestions to improve the feature. The general conclusion is that the standardized institutional affiliation link provided by Google Scholar Citations, despite working pretty well for a large number of institutions (especially Anglo-Saxon universities) still has a number of shortcomings and pitfalls which need to be addressed in order to make this authority control tool fully useful worldwide, both for searching purposes and for metric tasks