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As the number of citations to some of my articles recently increased, I took a look to see who cites me among the articles listed on Google Scholar. To my surprise I found that I was cited in a document describing talks in a conference and in a curriculum vitae. These two citations are not "real" so I would like to remove them.

Do you know how can we remove some of the citations from the Google Scholar profile?

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  • Since this is a common (and known) problem with Google Scholar (next to some others), people who care will know about it. You could use a variety of sources for a more correct citation count of your work (you will never get the exact number for sure)
    – Mark
    Oct 27, 2019 at 15:50

2 Answers 2

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You can't.

Google Scholar, like everything Google, does not curate the data. It only indexes them and makes them easy to search through. If the citing document is online it'll be counted as a citation.

Google Scholar citations count, h-index and i-10 index are not accurate if you have quality criteria for what constitute a citation (an most reasonable academics do) and should be interpreted with caution.

There are commercial products that give more meaningful citations count per article or researcher. They are generally available via your institution's library.

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  • I was afraid that's the case. I searched a bit and didn't find an option to delete citations... I am aware that there are other things which give meaningful citations, like MathSciNet, but I was thinking I could manage my Google Scholar page to reflect the reality. In current state it is quite useless. I mean, counting citations from a CV? What if Google finds my CV? Will it update all citation numbers by 1?
    – Beni Bogosel
    Jan 31, 2017 at 10:42
  • Google seems to understand when there are multiple copies of the same document. Thus if you have multiple CVs it won't increment the citation count.
    – Richard Kavanagh
    Jan 31, 2017 at 10:49
  • It's not about multiple documents. That can be fixed with "Merge". It's about false citations from documents not owned by me, that I cannot delete...
    – Beni Bogosel
    Jan 31, 2017 at 10:55
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    @BeniBogosel: really the problem is that Google Scholar mis-names these things "citations". It should call them "search results", i.e. mentions online of your article title...
    – Steve Jessop
    Jan 31, 2017 at 11:12
  • I would not call it a problem that Google calls such things a citation. It really is one, just not a scientific one. This is commonly known so there is nothing wrong with it. And this is also one of the reasons that you should always give a source when giving e.g. your h-index.
    – Snijderfrey
    Oct 28, 2019 at 19:43
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Log into Google on your scholar page, then select the article. Clicking on the offending article, to go onto it's page. Once on the page for the article there should be a delete option.

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  • Perhaps you could ask them directly: support.google.com/scholar/contact/general?authuser=1 the following link was found via this page: blog.impactstory.org/make-google-scholar-better
    – Richard Kavanagh
    Jan 31, 2017 at 10:45
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    I couldn't verify this. I can delete one of my articles but I cannot delete one of the citations to it.
    – FuzzyLeapfrog
    Jan 31, 2017 at 11:46
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    Yes, these instructions only go so far as deleting an article. Perhaps a Google scholar support request could be used to delete an citing article/document.
    – Richard Kavanagh
    Jan 31, 2017 at 12:53
  • it worked for me just now. I have no idea why this has a negative score. I logged onto my Google Scholar profile. Went to the list of articles. Each has a little square checkbox next to it. I clicked the box. It gave me a delete option, and the article is gone off the profile.
    – user124198
    May 16, 2020 at 11:42
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    @user251242 Because it doesn't answer the question asked.
    – GoodDeeds
    Sep 8, 2020 at 17:12

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