Measuring the visibility of the Egyptian universities scientific production using google scholar

Abstract EN

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore and measure the visibility of the scientific production of Egyptian universities and affiliated scholars in Google Scholar.

The study also explores the use of Google Scholar to build academic profiles by the Egyptians academics.

Design/methodology/approach - The study used google scholar and publish and perish software to calculate the number of profiles, number of citations and publishing years.

The sample of the study consisted of 18 Egyptian universities out of 25 universities.

Findings - The study found that there is an increasing interest among Egyptian universities and scholars who are affiliated with these universities to put their profiles and scholarly publications on Google Scholar as it is considered a tool to measure the university and the scholars' performance in the academic sphere.

The study also showed that there is a significant increase in the number of citations between 2016 and 2017 in many universities which reveal an increasing move in publishing more research in the international outlets.

Research limitations/implications- This study focused on analysing the visibility of Egyptian scholar on Google Scholar only.

The study did not explore the differences in structure and size between Google Scholar and other citation indices.

Originality/value- There are a few studies investigating universities and scholars' visibility on Google Scholar additionally, there is no Arabic or English study that tried to explore Egyptian scholars' visibility on Google Scholar.

The value of the current research lies in being the first study that focuses on investigating and exploring the profiles of Egyptian universities in Google Scholar which would lead to more studies that aim to explore how to increase the visibility of Egyptian universities in the international context.