Your citation updates on Google Scholar will determine the number of your citation metrics whether or not it is increasing. Every day, you may check your citation counts on Google Scholar to see the progress of how many people have cited your publications.
Of course, you may need to ensure that your citation metrics and the graph of citations is kept up-to-date. However, you do not have to do anything, since Google Scholar will automatically update your citation metrics and graph. Then, you may wonder how often Google Scholar updates your citation metrics. Let’s dive into our post to find the answer!
How Often Are Your Citations Updated on Google Scholar?
Google Scholar will automatically update each user’s citation metrics every other day. That’s why you do not have to do anything to manually update your citation metrics on Google Scholar.
It is known that Google Scholar will find new citations any time it updates its index, so the update frequency of this profile is a great proxy for the update frequency of Google Scholar itself. If you set up a web service to take an automatic screenshot of your profile every day. According to some sources, it turns out the update frequency is very regular and found that citations increase roughly 1500 exactly every other day.
How to Make Your Articles Automatically Updated?
You may have just added a new article and you want your new article updated automatically. Of course, you can do it easily by doing the following steps:
- First, you need to choose ‘Configure article updates’ from the menu.
- Then, you can select the automatic updates settings and then click ‘Update Settings’.
- By clicking this, your profile will be automatically updated as Google Scholar is updated.
It is known that Update Settings can only control the updates to your list of articles. It will not control the updates to your ‘Cited by’ counts and citation metrics. Of course, those are always updated to reflect the current state of the web. If the menu does not appear, you can sign into your Google Scholar account that you used to create your profile.
In the case that your new article has not been automatically added to your profile, but you have selected for automated updates, you may need to add a missing article to your profile by choosing ‘Add Articles’ from the menu and look for it.
If you cannot find your new article in Google Scholar, you can choose ‘Add article manually’ to enter its bibliographic record manually. If the menu does not appear, you can sign into your Google Scholar account that you used to create your profile.
How to Stop Automatic Updates to Your Profile?
For some reasons, you may want to stop automatic updates to your Google Scholar profile. Of course, you can easily stop automatic updates to your profile by following these steps:
- First, you need to choose ‘Configure article updates’ from the menu.
- Then, you can select the automatic updates settings and then click ‘Update Settings’.
- When Google Scholar identifies suitable updates for your profile, Google Scholar will send you an email message, so that you can review and apply the updates.
- If the menu does not appear, you can sign into your Google Scholar account that you used to create your profile.
How If One of Your Articles Is Not Matched in Google Scholar?
You may see the updates page says that one of your articles is not matched in Google Scholar. It occurs when Google Scholar search indexes have changed and they could match an article in your profile with the new index.
Most of the time, it can be caused by a duplicate of some other article in your profile. However, Google Scholar couldn’t determine which one. Sometimes, the article may have been eliminated from Google Scholar entirely, since it is no longer available on the web or due to the articles that reference it have become unavailable to Google Scholar robots.
You can check if your article is a duplicate by going to your profile and then click the ‘Title’ column header to sort by title and search for the article in question. If the same article is indeed listed multiple times, you can accept suggestions to remove the unmatched entry.
However, you can select to keep it in your profile if it is not a duplicate entry. Whereas, due to it not being matched in Google Scholar, its ‘Cited by’ count will be zero. You should note that your decision to keep an unmatched entry in your profile will not recover the entry in Google Scholar.
How to Add Missing Articles in Google Scholar?
You might have added some of the articles, but those are not in your profile. If it happens, of course, you need to add missing articles by doing some following steps:
- First, you need to choose the ‘Add’ option from the menu.
- Then, you can search for your articles using title, keywords or your name.
You can just click on ‘Search articles’ and then on ‘Add Article’ beside the articles you want to add one article at a time.
- In the following page, your citation metrics will immediately be updated to account for the articles you added.
- If your search does not find the article you want to add, you may need to click on the ‘Add article manually’ link.
- After that, type in the authors, title, etc and click the ‘Save’ button.
It’s important to note, citations to manually added articles may not appear in your profile for a few days.
How to Add a Group of Related Articles?
You also want to add a group of related articles. Of course, you can do it by clicking on ‘Search article groups’ and then on ‘Add article group’ beside the group you want to add. If you’ve authored articles under different names in different journals, you may have to choose multiple groups.
Of course, your citation metrics will immediately update to account for the groups you added. If you add an article group, Google Scholar will keep track of changes to this group when search robots index the web.
