GSC Author Profiles
Google Scholar is a free very large bibliographic database that it is especially useful for bibliometric purposes as it provides the number (and lists all of them) of citations received by the items included. Its current size is over 240 million unique documents, (many of them with links to openly available full-text versions). This is almost three times the current coverage of the paywalled competitors like WoS/Clarivate or Scopus/Elsevier.
GS Citations is a tool for setting up author profiles of individuals and their publications as covered by GS. There are many advantages in generating your own profile using GSC. It is really very easy to use as you only need a Google account to start collecting your publications and the associated metrics. The system is very powerful and it guides you in every step offering candidate publications (with a very low error rate) and the possibility of merging, delete or adding records.
GSC profile should be voluntarily created by a person, the author or if he/she is already dead by another individual whishing to make an homage by recording his/her scientific publications.
There are several presentations with easy instructions that can help you in the process. We cite these two slides collections in English and Spanish:
* How to set up your Google Scholar profile in Google Scholar Citations (Sarah Goodier)
* Como crear y mantener un perfil de investigador en Google Scholar Citations (Delgado & Orduña)
Please, follow the following advices and take into account the warnings about nasty practices:
GSC Institutional Profiles
Only Google Scholar can create an institutional profile. If your university or institution is not included you should contact directly with Google Scholar. asking for setting it up. If the institutional profile is not including all the public profiles of your faculty members, please check the pending omnes have an standard instititutional name in the affiliattion AND an institutional email address.
There is no problem in using other alphabets or acronyms if an alternative normalized latin alphabet version is provided too.
Information about the updates
The rankings are updated irregularly, without a fixed frequency. When the number of new profiles reach a 'critical mass' or an important mistake is discovered, then the data for the full list of the country scientists is collected. Although Google Scholar database is updated daily and many profiles can change abruptly in a few days it is both not feasible and not fair (for comparison purposes) to refresh individual accounts. Please, take into account that in fact changes can affect to many profiles and even a large increase in your citations or h-index personal count could mean you are losing ranks in the list when comparing with others with a faster growing rate!.
Individual updating will be unfair with the rest of colleagues.