Dr Alistair Legione

Dr Alistair Legione

Lecturer in Veterinary Microbiology and Public Health at the University of Melbourne

Shiny - ScholarPlot

2 minute read

Published:

ScholarPlot is an R Shiny tool for visualising and exporting your Google Scholar data. The intent of the tool was for easy export of a plot or table of your research application for things like CVs, promotion applications, or other workplace examples where you need to provide evidence of output. The source code for Scholarplot is available on my github page

The input is your Google Scholar ID. You can find this in your Google Scholar web address. If you go to your scholar profile, your individual ID can be found as part of the web address.

Example URL

In the above example, my user ID is highlighted (i.e. OmIonF8AAAAJ).

The current primary output is a plot of papers per year and citations per year, a secondary output is a table of the publications of the author to date, ordered by ‘Paper Score’: A custom metric that aims to take into account impact factor of the journal and the number of citations per year of the manuscript itself. This can be helpful for applications that ask for you to provide your ‘top 10 papers’.

Below is an example of the ScholarPlot output of bioinformatics wizard Heng Li (Assistant professor of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School).

Heng Li ScholarPlot Example

Plots and tables can be exported separately. Years of publication can be adjusted for the plot, these don’t as of yet affect the table output.

NOTE: It’s important to curate your Google Scholar profile appropriately to obtain meaningful data from this tool. This includes merging duplicates and removing erroneously assigned authorship. Additionally, journals that aren’t recognised by the ‘Scholar’ R package’s algorithm will unfortunately default to the highest impact factor (~240).

Run your own local version

You can run ‘ScholarPlot’ on your own computer.

To run, start by installing the programming language R and the GUI interface RStudio

Then run the below commands in the Rstudio console

install.package('shiny')
library(shiny)
runGitHub("ScholarPlot", "alegione")

This will download and run the Shiny application locally

To Do List

  • Word cloud pulling frequent terms from paper abstracts
  • Convert output table to sortable DT type table for easy ordering by year, citations, first author, etc.
  • Option for Papers/Year or Citations/Year or Both, rather than merging by default

Thanks/References

The tool leans on the fantastic ‘Scholar’ package by Yu et al (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/scholar/)

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4 minute read

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4 minute read

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5 minute read

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