rrrlw/med-student-research

Tool to track reseach output of medical students as a research outcome using Google Scholar as a database.

Tracking medical student research output using R and Google Scholar

Raoul R. Wadhwa, Sneha Sharma, Bruce Spevak, Neil B. Mehta

Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University

Purpose

Tracking educational outcomes of medical students is important to ensure that they are receiving a quality education. One relevant educational outcome in the field of academic medicine is research output during the medical school years. Google Scholar provides a convenient central database that automatically updates as students publish their research. This tool thus provides educators and education researchers with a straightforward method to track research outcomes for medical students. Note that the functionality can easily be extended to track the research output of any member of academia with a Google Scholar profile.

Getting Started

Once students have created Google Scholar profiles and provided their unique IDs, the collective data needs to be formatted in the style shown in the sample dataset, Data.csv. The following lines of code can be typed into a Unix Terminal to collect cross-sectional data (Data.csv file).

N.B. R and git need to be installed beforehand.

git clone https://github.com/rrrlw/med-student-research.git
cd med-student-research
Rscript collectPubs.R
Rscript collectProfiles.R

The code above should generate two CSV files:

• Pubs.csv contains the list of publications for the authors listed in Data.csv as shown on Google Scholar
• Profiles.csv contains the profile information (h-index, number of citations, etc.) for the authors listed in Data.csv, one line per author

Reference Tools

This work used the following tools:

• R programming language (>= 3.5)
• scholar package for R (>= 0.1.7)
• Google Scholar

Contribute

For any comments, suggestions, questions, or bug reports, please use the Issues page for this GitHub repo.