The Use of Google Scholar for Tenure and Promotion Decisions

In this essay, we conduct a review of the ways in which Google Scholar, Scopus, and other bibliometric tools may prove useful for faculty in tenure and promotion decisions. We begin with an examination of literature from multiple disciplines on the use of bibliometric platforms. We then examine the metrics provided by these platforms for citation analysis and determine their relative strengths and weaknesses. We provide a quantitative descriptive analysis of the differences in metrics across 1,840 faculty in six disciplines across 40 institutions in eight different Carnegie Classifications. The work concludes with recommendations for supplementary metrics and a call for tenure and promotion committees to augment the additional metrics we present with other forms of colleague recognition of the scholarship tenure and promotion candidates.