Thoughts on Google Scholar

  

Thoughts on Google Scholar

David Lester

            I frequently download my Google Scholar listing of articles and citations and endeavour to edit and correct it. There are often so many errors: articles I did not write, volume and page numbers of journal articles missing, and I dislike entries that are ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

            What is my most cited article? It doesn’t have the word suicide in the title, but our 1974 article on the hopeless scale now has 6,224 citations.

            But what is more surprising is that some articles received no citations while others have received citations. I write so much and, at the time of writing the articles, I gave no thought to their importance. I wrote for the fun of it. Could I get an article in this new journal? Could I get an article from these data? Even in graduate school days in the 1960s, a friend accused me of “cluttering up the literature.”

Beck, A. T., Weissman, A., Lester, D., & Trexler, L. The measurement of pessimism: the hopelessness scale. Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology, 1974, 42, 861-865.

            6,224 citations: that is not surprising.

Lester, D., Narkunski, A., Burkman, J., & Gandica, A. An exploratory study of correlates of success in a vocational training program for ex-addicts. Psychological Reports, 1975, 37, 1212-1214.

            I was asked to help out with their training program, and I knew Psychological Reports would take the article, but 7 citations. I’m shocked. It seems to have been of interest.

Wahlgren, K., & Lester, D. The big four personality in dogs. Psychological Reports, 2003, 92, 828

            Again, I wrote this one page note just for fun, and it has 10 citations. For some of these articles with citations, I am tempted to see where and how they was cited. Did someone really find them provocative?

            Since I knew the suicide literature well up to 1997 through my obsessive reviews of the literature (4 editions of Why People Kill Themselves), I knew that some of my notes were the first article on the topic, such as

Lester, D. Anomie and the suicidal individual. Psychological Reports, 1970, 26, 532.

That has 5 citations. But these following articles (among hundreds) have no citations! Did nobody find the topic of interest and did the articles stimulate no further research? Of course, sometimes the journal is responsible – very few people peruse them. But the topics seemed interesting to me, even important.

Czabanski, A., & Lester, D. Suicide among Polish officers during World War II in Oflag-II-C Woldenberg. Psychological Reports, 2013, 112, 727-731.

Lester, D. The murder of women around the world. EuroCriminology, 1996, 10, 155-157.

Lester, D. Suicide and anti-semitism. Journal of Psychology & Judaism, 1994, 18, 249-258.

Lester, D. Symbolism in the Chinese language. International Journal of Symbology, 1974, 5(1), 18-21.

            It is most welcome that we don’t know how our articles will be received as we write and submit it or else we might never finish and publish them.