Research Impact

If you have published at all, you likely already have a Google Scholar presence. Google Scholar is a wide-ranging web scraping resource that lists citation information and links out to publisher sites: and in some cases, includes copies of papers.

Your Google Scholar profile provides a list of your publications, with metrics including citation count, h-index, and a verified institutional affiliation. If you choose to make your profile public, your profile will appear at the top of Google Scholar searches for your name, which makes your research easier to find.

Users can also associate their TMU credentials with Google Scholar to identify search results available in the TMU catalogue.

Go to Google Scholar and sign in with your TMU credential. Once you have signed in, click on 'my profile'. This will take you to a page where you can personalise your account.

Once you have updated your profile, click through to 'articles' and review the list of potential titles. Please remember that not all of these articles will be yours, or many will be duplicates. Read through the list carefully and select those which are valid.

Your Google Scholar profile is ideal to help manage your publications, generate publication metrics (including h-index and citation count) which can be used in annual reports and tenure files, which is particularly useful for publications not indexed in Scopus or Web of Science (and thus do not have metrics in those areas). Google Scholar Metrics are less reliable than those at Scopus and Web of Science, because they do not undergo the same quality control processes, and are often artificially inflated and feature errors. Even with this in mind, it can be useful to get a sense of usage on your work so long as you do not place undue emphasis on the results.

Your Google Scholar Profile allows you to collect all of your research together into a single profile, for easy discoverability.  

Keep in mind that you should expect to manually maintain your profile, to ensure that any new publications are associated and that all added titles are appropriate or valid. This can be time-consuming, but after your initial setup this should be reduced to periodical maintenance.

Question: my Google Scholar profile is still currently attached to Ryerson. Can you fix this for me, or ask Google to do it?

As a Google campus, all researchers have access to Google Scholar by simply logging in to the site. If there is no existing account attached to that email address, Google Scholar will establish a new account and will associate relevant scholarship to it. Faculty members have the option to set their Google Scholar account to automatically update any future research releases, and will accrue metrics like citations of use to the researcher. The benefit to Google Scholar is that it is entirely user-driven, so neither TMU nor Google have any access to adjust accounts or make changes. Any faculty member who set up their Google Scholar presence in the times prior to the university's name change will have a Ryerson affiliation on their account. We are unable to change this, but the faculty member will have the opportunity to make a change for themselves. 

There are two approaches to this:

1. If you remember your password and are able to log in to your Ryerson-affiliated Google Scholar account, log in and manually change your email address to your TMU address. You will be sent a verification email and this will update your affiliation.
2. If you do not have access to your old account, access https://scholar.google.ca/ and click 'sign in' at the top right corner. Use the TMU CAS to log in. This will establish a new account with your TMU credentials, and you can update it with all of your publications. Google will then send you an alert as it notices the duplicate, with the option to delete one of them. When this happens, choose your TMU one, and your Ryerson account will be removed.

This guide has been created by the Toronto Metropolitan University Library and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License unless otherwise marked.