Creating a Google Scholar account

A Google Scholar account can help with research and make your work more discoverable. It displays papers, citation information, and recognitions.

Your Google Scholar Citations profile is a very simple way to collate your publications, citations and even research data so that others can find it, and often read it too.

Keep your Google Scholar profile up to date with automatic updates. With this, you don’t need to spend a lot of time updating your publications list. 

This article describes how you can create a Google Scholar account and start publishing articles on your Google Scholar profile.

This free service is provided by Google and may not be continued indefinitely. Please ensure you have selected the correct institution before entering your details.

Steps to create Google Scholar Account

To create your Google Scholar Account in 2022, then you must follow these steps carefully;

1. Create a Google account if you do not yet have a Google account, you can create one here https://accounts.google.com/signup. This will give you a Gmail address which you can use or ignore forever as you wish. This takes about 5 min.
2. Find your publications – Go to Google Scholar at https://scholar.google.co.uk/, log in to your Google account (top right of the page and click ‘My Citations’ which will either appear on the top line of the page or top right.

Follow the instructions to create your profile adding your name, university, and subject area (you can type in a few keywords here and it is recommended that you do so), university email address (not made public but used to confirm who you say you are) and the link to your University of Reading profile page. Google Scholar will then search for articles that it thinks are by you and ask whether you want them added to your profile. Some will be by you, and others may be by academics with the same or similar names, but Google is pretty good at distinguishing subject areas. If there are publications missing from your profile, you can search for them by choosing the ‘Add’ and then ‘Add articles’. You can search by document title or by DOI. If you still can’t find your output or it is not available online, you can use the ‘Add’ option and then ‘Add article manually’ to create a record. You can give Google permission to automatically update the list of articles in your profile if you wish (it doesn’t often get things wrong, and you can remove articles incorrectly attributed to you if it does). Add a photo of yourself (why not use the one from your University of Reading profile page?).

3. Make your profile PUBLIC.

Save your profile and tick the box to make the profile public. This will mean that your profile will appear in Google search results and your research will be more discoverable. Once you have activated your profile, Google Scholar gives you the option of automatically advising you of any new citations to your work (click on the ‘Follow’ tab) When your profile is complete, you can browse some of your citations and see how people are using your work and check out your h-index.