hw2-1 Finding first author publication count

[bdallen-uchicago]

I don't see any easy way to find this statistic, especially across all databases and publication venues. PubMed does have advanced search by author, including "Author - First", but I think that is first name, not first author on the study. So even searching within a single database that seems problematic. Am I missing something?

[bjmc]

We might be able to get that information from Google scholar. I think they index a wider variety of sources than PubMed.

[bdallen-uchicago]

Tried that, they list all publications by an author, but I don't see a total count, and I don't see a way to limit it to first author only.

[bjmc]

Web of Science is another place that we might try: http://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=282982&p=1888178

[sdkramer10]

You're correct, google scholar lists all publications by author. From there, I just went through all of the publications and counted the ones where his name was listed first.

[bdallen-uchicago]

Oops didn't mean to close. I want to think there is a better way, I thought the homework was supposed to be straightforward. Also, isn't h-index a more useful/easy to acquire statistic? What is the practical value of tracking down this statistic?

[tabinks]

If you had looked under the PubMed Tips listed on the Session 2 page on the website, you would see the very first tip contains how to do a first author search in PubMed. Also, the first page of the PuMed help lists how to do a first author search.

There is no better indication of a person's body of work than their first author publications. The practical value of the number of first author publications, is that it shows their contributions to the field, those in which, as the first author, they conducted the most amount of work. If you are the first author, it means it is your work. H-index is almost meaningless for many reasons.

• The H-index only works properly only for comparing scientists working in the same field; citation conventions differ widely among different fields. In a field like bioinformatics, do you compare people to biologists or computer scientists? It will all depend on what journal you publish in, one that skews more biology or more computer science. If you waffle the line, you will look mediocre in both.
• H-index is highly criticized for the emphasis on citations. For example, a professor I know has one of the best h-indices you will ever come across in any field for one simple reason. He wrote the crystallograhpy software that processes X-ray data. The 2 page article he wrote on it (in a very obscure journal), has been cited over 100,000 times because every single protein structure ever solved (and those to be solved later) will use this software. All of the citations skew the h-index to the point that it can not be take seriously.
• The h-index does not take into account if you are first author. Some physics papers have hundreds of authors who will all receive the same contribution to their h-index for the paper. On a more typical paper, the authorship represents contribution to the paper, with first doing the most work (and so on). This is ignored by h-index. You can imagine a scenario where a technician who spends all day cloning DNA for a large lab is named on 50 different papers in a year where he did cloning. The first authors of those papers who designed, conducted, and managed the research may have only had time to write a couple of papers in that same year. By the h-index, who is a more productive scientist?

[bdallen-uchicago]

Thanks @tabinks, I guess I relied too heavily on the advanced search, weird that they don't include first author as an option there. That still only includes articles in PubMed though - seems like it would be useful for wider indexes like Google Scholar to start tracking first author publications along with h-index.