A few days ago, I received an email that read like a typical scam: “We’ve looked you up online, and we’re really impressed. We’re starting a new club and want you as a founding member. For a small annual fee of $x or a lifetime fee of $y …” The message had eluded my junk filter, so I decided to read it more closely.

Google Scholar on Steroids

The email was from a startup called ScholarGPS that is attempting to disrupt the field of scholarly analytics. Here is a link to a three-minute introduction on YouTube. I compared ScholarGPS to Google Scholar, and I can report that ScholarGPS is Google Scholar on steroids.

I have often looked up individual scholars’ citation counts on Google Scholar for tenure or promotion reviews or judging academic awards. It provides a total citation count only if the individual has registered. And it provides no information about the individual’s peer group and how they compare to that group.

Here’s how ScholarGPS goes far beyond Google Scholar. Its creators have data-mined 145 million academic publications and developed 28.9 million profiles of active, retired, and deceased scholars. They have developed publication records for all 28.9 million scholars and have assigned each one to 14 fields, 177 disciplines, and over 350,000 specialties. The data-mining operation is continually repeated and individual records updated annually. I can look up any scholar’s complete publication record and see how they compare to other scholars in the field(s), discipline(s), or specialties in which they do research.

Comparative rankings are based on three factors: productivity; impact, measured by citations in academic publications; and quality, measured by the number of frequently cited publications (the H-index). There are eight (that is 2 x 2 x 2) options provided for rankings: lifetime or over the last five years; with or without self-citations; and, for multi-authored works, either giving each author full credit or dividing up the credit so that each of n authors gets (1/n)^th . ScholarGPS can also do institutional and departmental rankings, which are another important feature, but not of particular concern to me.

How Does My Research Record Measure Up?

ScholarGPS contacted me because I was identified as a top scholar, that is my publication record is in the top .5 percent (118,510) of the 28,900,000 scholars who were ranked. I checked, and they included almost all my academic publications, right back to the beginning of my career. I was gratified to see that ScholarGPS considered me a productive and high-quality researcher. I also checked the ranking options. My lifetime ranking is much better than my score over the last five years, no surprise because I retired four years ago. My rankings with or without self-citations are very similar, because I didn’t cite myself very often. Finally, my score when all coauthors divide up credit is considerably better than when all coauthors get full credit. Much of my work was sole-authored or with a small number of co-authors, in contrast to the practice in many scientific fields of including as an author anyone who was in the slightest way involved in the research.

It’s a fact of life that, no matter how far out you are on the tail of a distribution, there’s always someone farther. Scholar GPS identifies those who are in the top .05 percent of on the 28.9 million as “highly ranked scholars.” This category seems to include Nobel laureates and people who are insanely productive.

ScholarGPS identified my two major specialties correctly: public sector studies and public administration. I was 32^nd out of 118 top scholars in the former and 58^th out of 156 top scholars in the latter. Therefore, I held my own among the top scholars in my specialties and I had made significant contributions. I checked the names of the other top scholars. I recognized virtually every one of them and had coauthored with a few, worked on reviewing journal articles or tenure or promotion files with others, and had met many at conferences (which a colleague once called, inverting Veblen, the leisure of the theoried class.) These people, from all over the world, were my colleagues. I nostalgically write “were” because as I retiree I no longer do reviewing or attend conferences, and I no longer have much contact with them.

As a shout-out, here is a list of these cherished colleagues, some of whom perhaps will read this post: Don Kettl, Richard Walker, John Bryson, Bob Behn, Norma Riccucci, Carolyn Heinrich, Jacob Torfing, Eran Vigoda-Gadot, Brint Milward, Don Moynihan, Evan Berman, Rod Rhodes, Marc Holzer, Stephen Osborne, Michael Barzelay, Charles Goodsell, Beryl Radin, Alasdair Roberts, Fred Thompson, Fran Berry, and two late great Canadian colleagues, Peter Aucoin and Ken Kernaghan.

It surprises me that there were very few Canadians on the two lists. I looked up quite a few Canadian public administration scholars that I know, and their work is most often classified by ScholarGPS as political science. My francophone colleagues are at a disadvantage if they write in French because French language scholarly publications have a much smaller circulation than those in English.

Not the Whole Story

Though Scholar GPS provides fascinating analytics, I don’t consider it to be the last word about my academic career, and not even my research career. Teaching was important to me, and I was most effective as a teacher in the decade before retiring. And I had several significant administrative assignments and organizational gigs. Finally, what I discovered in my research is more important to me than how many citations it received. This is particularly the case for my research on narrative and management, which has received far less attention and fewer citations than my public administration research. When I write a memoir, these are the things I will write about.

Whither ScholarGPS?

ScholarGPS is produced by Meta Analytics LLC, a Los Angeles-based startup incorporated only last year. Meta Analytics’ business model is to encourage individual scholars to register, for which they receive individual profiles and rankings of highly rated and top scholars for free. Premium ($35 US annually) and Ultimate ($85 US annually) individual plans allow you to see larger numbers of scholars. The real money appears to be in institutional subscriptions that allow all members of the institution to see the larger datasets and enable administrators to do assessment and benchmarking. At the top of the scale, an assessment and benchmarking plan for an institution with 5000 scholars would cost $120,000 US. Now that ScholarGPS is being rolled out, it will be interesting to see whether it can sell the institutional subscriptions that would validate its business model.

Perhaps Meta Analytics has another idea. If ScholarGPS is so much better than Google Scholar, maybe Alphabet will buy the firm and make ScholarGPS the new, improved version of Google Scholar. Stay tuned.