A great new fea­ture has been added to Google Scholar Cita­tions. For those authors who have set up a cita­tions page, it is now pos­si­ble to get email alerts for any new arti­cles they pub­lish, or for any new cita­tions of their arti­cles. So you can track cita­tions to your own work this way, and stay up-​​​​to-​​​​date with key authors in your field. Set­ting up a Google Cita­tions page is super-​​​​easy and was already worth doing. This new func­tion­al­ity is another rea­son to do it. After all, as researchers we want peo­ple to read our stuff, so we might as well make it as easy as pos­si­ble for peo­ple to find what we write. To set up your Google Cita­tions page, go to scholar​.google​.com/​c​i​t​a​tions. To fol­low an author, find their cita­tions page and look for the “Fol­low this author” box at the top right of the page. Hope­fully, Google will add RSS feeds as an option in the future as I’d much rather get alerts that way then by yet more email in my inbox.

A researcher por­tal is a web­site that attempts to list all the pub­li­ca­tions of a given researcher. Some por­tals also allow shar­ing papers, inter­act­ing with other researchers, cal­cu­lat­ing cita­tion sta­tis­tics, etc. Every researcher wants their work read and cited, so these web­sites can be use­ful tools for get­ting your work noticed. They can also func­tion as a de facto home page if you don’t already have a per­sonal web­site. Con­versely, they can be a good way to find new work by researchers in your field. How­ever, unless a site pro­vides a rel­a­tively com­plete list of your pub­li­ca­tions, and cov­ers a large pro­por­tion of the research com­mu­nity in your dis­ci­pline, it is of lim­ited value.