My citation count dropped by nearly 3000 citations. All of my Physical Review Letters dissappeared from GS sometime around mid February. I was fortunate to have an open window of GS with data before the decrease. My hypothesis is that American Physical Societry Journals, particularly Phys. Rev. Lett. have modified access to APS journals leading to massive undercounts on GS for those who typically publish in APS journals. Many of my colleagues experienced similar undercounts on GS. Recommended Action: write to the Editor in Chief of APS Journals and complain that GS is being blocked from counting your citations. - JAS

Hi,

I have noticed this occurrence and I though that I am imagining it, but apparently it is true. I cannot explain why it happened, but one of my papers that had 74 citations, now has 72 citations. It could be that several scholarly sites were closed, or any other reason.

I have noticed the same and agree with suggestion of Dr. Avishag Gordon. It also could be that some of the scholarly sites previously recognised by Google scholar are no longer recognised or existing.

In addition to previous suggestions, it is important to know that google scholar often review the quality of all citations to each paper in its database. Google scholar will drop citations obtained from articles whose hosting websites no longer exist, and sometimes will remove erratic self-citation.

Also, some authors do not use consistent name formats, which means a citation that belongs to another author might be attributed to you. Or, a citation that belongs to you might be attributed to another author, due to similar name formats. When Google scholar resolves this issue, your citation will reduce or increase as well. It's your responsibility to make your name unique. Simply, adding your middle name to your name and last name can help resolve this.

To avoid or reduce this problem, you can do the following:

1. Create a personalized google scholar page

2. Use consistent author name format on all your articles and working papers, and the author name format on your articles should appear exactly the way it appears on your google scholar profile.

3. When uploading your article online, make sure you upload it as a .pdf file not .doc file

4. For working papers, it is best to upload them through ssrn, mpra, arxiv for faster indexing on google scholar

5. Avoid submitting articles to predatory journals. Google scholar does not recognize most of the new publishing websites, and it takes some time for their indexing request to be accepted by google scholar. This means that for this period you will lose some citations.

Hope this helps

Regards

Peterson

I am also facing the same situation, my 12 citations are less and i-10 index is also -1.

No idea what is going on?

I do not check my citations often. When I checked my h-index after a gap of a few months, I saw it went down by a whopping 5 points. In my case, it usually goes up a point about every year. A 5 point decrease means five of my highly (>45) cited papers suddenly disappeared. I do not understand.

Mine reduced from 39 to 32 with a bunch of 39's 38's 37's ready to explode. I see now the absence of quite a few pagers of mine with many citations, ~100. If the same applies to everyone -- e.g. because of reduction due to self citations, I wouldn't complain. So long as it's an even playing field, that's fine. But if it's others benefitting from my quite common name and siphoning off my citations, that's "fighting words".

12th American generation John W. Clark

My citation count dropped by nearly 3000 citations. All of my Physical Review Letters dissappeared from GS sometime around mid February. I was fortunate to have an open window of GS with data before the decrease. My hypothesis is that American Physical Societry Journals, particularly Phys. Rev. Lett. have modified access to APS journals leading to massive undercounts on GS for those who typically publish in APS journals. Many of my colleagues experienced similar undercounts on GS. Recommended Action: write to the Editor in Chief of APS Journals and complain that GS is being blocked from counting your citations. - JAS

Thanks, Jim, for the clarification.

Warm regards,

John

My citation count decreased too. Especially, one of my Physical Review E articles had more than 20 citation and now it has only 3 citations. I thought it happened only to me I was wondering why it happened. Now I realized that it is not only me! That particular article has 18 citations even in the APS website. Will it be fixed sometimes soon?

I found that my papers in the Journal of Chemical physics, an American Institute pf Physics journal, as well as other journals, are not being counted in Google Scholar. Here is the excerpt from the automated reply from Google Scholar.

Incorrect bibliographic information in Google Scholar results: Please click on the erroneous result and contact the owner of the website where we found it. Please ask them to follow the technical guidelines below to help fix the indexing of their articles. http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html

I can't find my paper anymore! My citation count has gone down! That can happen because we index scholarly articles available to us on the Web, and the Web changes. Chances are that some website that used to host your paper or papers that cite it no longer do so. Please contact your publisher about adding your papers or correcting their bibliographic data. Unfortunately, we're unable to include papers that are no longer available on the Web.

Two of my papers are listed as one... Some citations aren't counted... Please reply to this message with detailed examples of the problem. Please include the queries you used as well as the specific articles in question. Google Scholar is based on automated indexing algorithms. We're unable to make individual changes, but specific examples will help improve the automated techniques and will result in improved results for all users.

Library links registration, updates, and removals: Please contact the vendor of your link resolver (e.g., SFX) to make any changes regarding library links. If you are moving to a different link resolver, please contact both the previous vendor and the new vendor. Detailed information is available on our help page for libraries at http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/libraries.html

I have figured out what has happened. Some time ago Google Scholar started to cite old APS and some other journals differently. For example, my paper previously cited as

Possible metal-insulator transition at B= 0 in two dimensions

SV Kravchenko, GV Kravchenko, JE Furneaux, VM Pudalov, M D’Iorio

Physical Review B 50 (11), 8039 (1994)

is now cited as

SV Kravchenko, GV Kravchenko, JE Furneaux, VM Pudalov, and M. D’Iorio, Phys. Rev. B 50, 8039 (1994).

SV Kravchenko

Phys. Rev. B 50, 8039

This will not make much difference if you are the first author. But if you are not, all citations to this paper will disappear in your profile.

Solution: if you are not the first author of a certain paper, click on "+" on your Google Scholar page and then on "Add articles". Search for the first author's papers in which you are a co-author, select them and click on update (a tick in the upper right corner). The paper and the corresponding citations will be added to your profile.

Without a clue as to what was done, my GS citations reappeared today (7/4/19) with my missing APS Journal articles ... all of them. Check your GS.

Yes. They corrected it.

Hmmm. I thought it was just me. My citations and H-index have gone down too and not yet reappeared. Interesting.

Hi,

For one paper my citations went up with a jump, and for another, there were missing citations. Strange trend...!

My citations went back to something reasonable, so it seems that appropriate corrective actions are in play.

Indeed! They are working on it but still way to go!

Same problem here: my citations last week were 3595 and h-index: 20 and now they are 3185 and h-index: 18. This is huge!!!! I hope they fix it soon!

I can confirm J. A. Sauls observation - citations jumped up on Sunday by ca 60 and h-index by 3; for last 5-years respective numbers were 46 and 1, so the correction had a longer time span...

Yes I have noticed

I also observed same thing

Same observation here

As with JW Clark and K Hassan, my h-index also went up last week, not as high as it was before, but close. So, it looks like Google or some one is fixing the problem.

It is interesting, mine went down last week. Before, there was not any fluctuations.

Yes, I did notice a drop in cites over this period. In the past, I was told that some contributing databases were taken off line. Not sure what is going on.

Compared to last year's count I have lost about half of my Google Scholar citations, mostly from big astronomy journals. For some papers now it is only quarter of the count that Web of Science (which usually gives somewhat lower counts than Scholar) or other citation indices.  E.g. for this paper: https://scholar.google.hu/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&cites=4375212707486327713&scipsc= last year the citation count was well over 300 (Microsoft Academic still shows a count around that: https://academic.microsoft.com/#/detail/2069970095 ) now it is 70. For this one https://scholar.google.hu/scholar?cites=12007316023260534629&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en the count was above 8000 (see MS: https://academic.microsoft.com/#/detail/2157917411 ) now 1888.  I agree with @J_Sauls , that the problem may be of accessing some big publishers. There is a Google support thread here: https://support.google.com/assistant/thread/1707027?hl=en . The suggested solution of contacting support did not help.

I have the same problem. But I found it is not because the citations disppearred, it just were misplaced to another researcher's paper. It is a serious bug of google scholar. That is why some people said they suddenly get a lot of citations while others missed a lot of citations!

They (Google Scholar) have just had another glitch. I lost many of real citations and simultaneously gained some that did not belong to me. Unreliable service.

just realized it happened to me as well 2 days ago.

Yes, I have also found the same

I also noticed that both my citations and H index dropped. Please whats the solution.

Noticed the same thing for me.

I also noticed the drop of citation nos by 50% and H index etc. in google scholar recently. Don't know the reason.

I also experienced the same problem. More than 25 citations suddenly dropped and stable in total citations, its not increasing anymore. It's strange. But, nothing happened to my high index.

I gained 230 odd false citations (yay?). I wonder when this will fix. Anyone know?

I lost so many citations so that my H index and i10 index drooped. How to retrieve those?

My analysis tells that many big journals are not open source and references used in the articles published in those paid journals are not freely accessible to public/Google Scholar Crawler. As those references are not accessed by Google Scholar crawler so they cannot be used to increase the citation of any scientist(s). This may be a very serious issue if my analysis is right. Google scholar's citation count is purely based on web crawler. I noticed that all my missing citations belong to this category where references are not accessible freely. Big publishers like Wiley and Royal Society of Chemistry also have this issue. Publishers like Nature group always show references to all users at no cost even if main article is restricted. The only solution suggested by Google scholar to add missing citations is to contact publisher. I am looking for other opinions as well on my observation.

I also noticed that both my citations and H index dropped suddenly in last one month. Any suggestions?

I lost about 12 citations in Google Scholar few months ago. My H index dropped from 5 to 4 suddenly.

My Research Gate Index has dropped from 20.03 lady week to current 11.31... Other colleagues reporte the dame sudden decrease. What is the reason for this, if any one knows?

I mean "last" week, sorry.

Mine is stable at 43.24, but it's never been clear to me how this index is determined. A factor 1/2 decrease is certainly disturbing. It might be due to some confusion between similar names.