How to get historical publication/citation data?

[krisgulati]

Hi,

Is there an easy way to query the API to get historical information on a scholar's publications/citations?

The problem I'm encountering is that I have a scholar in year 2015 with 100 publications and 10,000 citations for example. I would like to get a similar scholar with a similar range (plus or minus 10% of 100 publications/10,000 citations) in the year 2015.

This is relatively easy when trying to get today's data, but I was just wondering if there is an easier way to do this for many scholars at some point in the past?

Thanks again in advance!

[trangdata]

Hi @krisgulati I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Are you using openalexR to do this? Could you give me an example for how you would do this now?

This is relatively easy when trying to get today's data,

[krisgulati]

Currently I'm doing it like this:

"oa_fetch(entity ="authors", works_count =">18", ,works_count ="<22", cited_by_count =">900", cited_by_count ="<1100", last_known_institution.country_code ="US", x_concepts.id = c("C17744445","C144024400"), options = list(sample = 150, seed = 1))"

This allows me to find matches within certain bounds on scholars today.

However, what I would like to do is do a similar matching process but going back historically.

For example, if I have a scholar in 2015 with 1000 citations and 20 papers with their top concepts being x,y,z. I would like to find 20 other scholars - in 2015 - who have the following criteria:

1. Between 900 and 1100 citations (plus or minus 10% of 1000 citations)
2. Between 18 and 22 publications (plus or minus 10% of 20 papers)
3. Similar research (using n concepts as documented above)
4. In 2015

Hopefully this is slightly clearer (apologies)!

[trangdata]

Hmm, that is a difficult query... What I think you might be able to do is

• first query for works with prespecified concepts before 2015 (perhaps going back to 1965, assuming a 50-year academic career for a researcher)
• then group these works by authors
• filter for authors with 18—22 of these works
• filter for authors with 900—1100 citations (will they be citations within these concepts or all citations?)

I would also recommend posting this question on the OpenAlex Community Google Group to see if others have better ideas!

[krisgulati]

Hey,

Thanks for the quick and thoughtful response! We may try your route! In some sense I'm happy that there wasn't an easy solution because it means at least I was trying the right thing :).

I'll try the Google Group now - thanks for sharing.