Find the authors who cite someone the most

Sometimes it can be useful to discover who cites a particular researcher the most. For instance, maybe that researcher is you, and you need to find people who could potentially write you a letter of evaluation. Or maybe you are on an evaluation committee and need to think of people who could write letters for a candidate.

This repository provides some instructions on how to do so, and a script to process/format the results.

Step 1: Get the citation data

Install Harzing's Publish or Perish program.

Find the Google Scholar profile of the researcher you're interested in, and copy their Google Scholar ID from the URL. It will look like D847cGsAAAAJ, for instance. Then in Publish or Perish, go to Search → New Google Scholar Profile Search, paste the ID into the "Profile ID" text box, and click "Search". This downloads the list of all the papers that person has published (in Google Scholar, anyway).

Once the person's profile is downloaded, select all the papers they have published in the list (e.g., right-click on one paper and click "Select All"). Then right click on any paper in the selected list and click "Retrieve Citing Works in Publish or Perish". This will create a new search that contains all the papers citing this person's papers.

At this point, the search will probably take some time. Also, you will probably get lots of pop-up boxes to prove that you are a human, so make sure you remember what buses look like in advance. For many profiles, Publish or Perish will also suggest that you pause for at least an hour at some point, to avoid getting banned. That is a good idea. You can resume later by right-clicking the corresponding "Google Scholar Citing" search in the list at the top (not the profile search), and clicking "Search".

Eventually, when it is done, right click on the search in the box at the top and select Save Results → Results as CSV. It should suggest a filename like PoPCites.csv, although you can change it.

Step 2: Process the data

This part is quite simple. You must have Python with Pandas installed. Then:

python popcites.py /path/to/PoPcites.csv

This will list the most common authors citing the person in question.