Friday, December 02, 2011

Google Scholar, My Citations, a new paradigm for finding great Computer Vision research papers

I have been finding great computer vision research papers by using Google Scholar for the past 2+ years.  My recipe is straightforward and has two key ingredients. First, by finding new papers that cite one of my published papers, I automatically get to read papers which will be relevant to my own research interests.  The best bit is that by using Google Scholar, I'm not limiting my search to a single conference -- Google finds papers from the raw web.

Second, I have a short list of superstar vision researchers (Jitendra Malik, among others) and I basically read anything and everything these gurus publish.  Regularly visiting academic homepages is the best way to do this, but Google Scholar also lets me search by name.  In addition, nobody lists on their homepage their papers' citation counts.  This means if I visit a researcher's personal website, I have to make a decision as to what paper to read based on (title, co-authors, publication venue).  But highly-cited papers are likely to be more important to read first.  I believe that this is a good rule of thumb, and very important if you are new to the field.

I am really glad that Google finally let researchers make public profiles to view their papers and see their citations, etc.  See Google Scholar blog for more information.  I've been using statcounter to monitor my blog's visitors, and now I can use Google Scholar to monitor who is citing my research papers!  I'm not claiming that the only way for me to read one of  your papers is to cite one of my papers, but believe me, even if we never met at a vision conference, if you cited one one my papers there's a good chance I already know about your research :-)  I would love to see Google Scholar Citations pages one day replace "my publications" sections on academic homepages...



My Citations screenshot



My only complaint with Google Scholar is that I can't seem to get it to recognize my two most recent papers.  I have these papers listed on my homepage, so do my co-authors, but Google isn't picking them up!!!  I manually added them to my Google My Citations page, and using Google Scholar I was able to find at least one other paper which cites on of these two papers.

I read the inclusion guidelines, and I'm still baffled.  The PDFs are definitely over 5MB, but my older papers which were indexed by Google were also over 5MB.  Dear Google, are you seriously not indexing my recent papers because they are over 5MB?  It takes us, researchers, months of hard work to get our work out the door.  We see the sun rise for weeks straight when we are in deadline-mode, and the conferences/journals give us size limitations -- we work hard to make our stuff fit within these limits (something like 20MB per PDF).  And we, researchers, are crazy about Google and what it means for organizing the world's information -- naturally we are jumping on the Google Scholar bandwagon. I really hope there's some silly reason why I can't find my own papers using Google Scholar, but if I can't find my own work, that means others can't find my own work, and until I can be confident that Google Scholar is bug-free, I cannot give it my full recommendation.

Problematic papers for Google Scholar:

Abhinav Shrivastava, Tomasz Malisiewicz, Abhinav Gupta, Alexei A. Efros. Data-driven Visual Similarity for Cross-domain Image Matching. In SIGGRAPH ASIA, December 2011.

Tomasz Malisiewicz, Abhinav Gupta, Alexei A. Efros. Ensemble of Exemplar-SVMs for Object Detection and Beyond. In ICCV, November 2011.

If anybody has any suggestions (there's a chance I'm doing something wrong), or an explanation as to why my papers haven't been indexed, I would love to hear from you.

7 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:21 PM

    These two are visible on your scholar profile now, at least I can see them.

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  2. I added them to my profile, but I can't use Google Scholar search to find them... Obviously I'm a little fish in the field of computer vision and people won't be going to my citations page directly.. I would like the search "Exemplar-SVM" to find my paper.. or a search for the title to retrieve it...

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  3. visionfans12:08 AM

    As to digging the relationship between researchers, finding the superstar researchers and the citation and other info of a paper, I think Microsoft Academic does better.

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  4. Anonymous4:47 PM

    Both the papers will appear once they appear on IEEE and ACM websites. Google will consider all papers on these websites irrespective of file sizes etc.

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  5. @visionfans I personally prefer Google Scholar over Microsoft Academic, although I agree that Microsoft has also done a great job with their system.

    @Anonymous Since I posted this blog post, my SIGGRAPH ASIA paper has popped up, but I'm still waiting for my ICCV paper to be indexed by Google. Clearly, file size limit is not the problem. However, I'm not sure what happens to papers that won't show up on IEEE/ACM websites.

    ReplyDelete