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5-Day Impact Challenge

A guide on how to increase your scholarly impact in just 5 days!

Google Scholar Citation Alerts

Your Google Scholar profile can be used to alert you whenever your articles receive new citations online. It tracks any citations to your publications that occur on the scholarly web.

If you haven’t already signed up for citation alerts...

  1. Log on to scholar.google.com (click "Sign in" in the top right corner of the page.)
  2. Click "My Profile" at the top of the page. This should bring you to your Google Scholar profile.
  3. Click the blue “Follow” button at the top of your profile.

  1. Make sure the email address displayed is your preferred one. Check the boxes you'd prefer alerts for.
  2. Click “Done.” Notifications will arrive in your inbox when you receive new citations.

If you want to explore who has already cited you, visit your profile page, and click on the number of citations to the right of the article you want to track citations for:

On the next page, you’ll see a list of all the papers that have cited you, some of which you’ll be able to click-through and read:

Remember: Google Scholar indexes citations it finds in a wide range of scholarly documents (white papers, slide decks, and of course journal articles are all fair game) and in documents of any language. The data pool is also mixed with respect to peer-review status; some of these citations will be in the peer-reviewed literature, some will not. This means that your citation count on Google Scholar may be larger than on other citation services.

Scopus Alerts

In Scopus, you can set up alerts for both articles and authors.

To create an alert for an article:

  1. Search for the article and then and click on the title in your search results.
     
  2. Once you’re on the Article Abstract screen, you will see a list of papers that cite your article on the right-hand side. To set your alert, click “Set citation alert” under “Inform me when this document is cited in Scopus.”

    A screenshot of an article on Scopus, with an arrow pointing to the "Set citation alert" button in the righthand menu.

To set an alert for any time you are cited:

  1. Click the Search tab on the Scopus homepage, then select "Authors" and run a search for your name. If multiple results are returned, check the author affiliation and subjects listed to find your correct author profile.

  2. Next, click on your author profile link.
  3. On your author details page, follow the “Set alert” link.

  4. At this point, if you have not yet created a Scopus account, you will need to create one.
    • Click the "Not Registered?" link.
    • Enter your information and click the "Register" button.
    • You should see a message saying your registration was successful and a "Continue" button. Click the button.
    • You should now be back on your author details page and you can proceed by clicking the “Get citation alerts” link again.
  5. Create a name for your saved alert, set an email address at which you would like to receive the alerts, and select your preferred frequency of alerts.
  6. Once you’re finished, click "Set Alert."