I have to document my boring RA work, cause it causes a lot of labors and I don't know more efficient way to do it. The task is quite simple: we are interested in the citation count of some authors in the top journals. The previous student already finished that summaries and we found the citation might not be accurate. The citation counts for one authors might also count others. for example, Rounds. J could be either Rounds JAME, OR  Rounds Jessica or whatever the fisrt name starts with J. The citation for ROunds J in our dataset include both, though we are interested in one of the two authors.  Hence, I am requested to check it again. I used SSCI database, and I also found some problems. SSCI is desinged to collect the citation and academica publication works of authors. However, it could not give the complete pubulication list for one author. Compared with CV provided by authors, I always found one or two journal publication was missing. In addtion, I also compared the results from SSCI with scholar.google.com. They two are not exactly the same. In fact, the latter did a better job to provide the pubilication list for one author,more complete than SSCI. However, since it is not a academic tool, I can't trust the citation counts provided by google.

    Finally, although I used SSCI to track the citation counts, I doubt the percent of completeness. I feel like, although I spend a lot of time doing it, the results are not statsfying.  I also thought,  why we didn't stop doing the citation work in the first time when we found that problem. it really wastes a lot of time!

  

     The other problem is : for authors, they might change from one institution (for instance, school) to others. To locate the same author, you have to find out all the institutions he/she belonged, then you will get the complete publication list. I am wondering, could the database do the updata work aumotically? In other word, the database should add a new column called'final institution'. This new variable will be automatically associated with any previous publications the author had. For users, once we input the author's name and final institution,  we can get the whole publication list.   For instance, one author published one paper A when she was in school A. Later, she moved to school B and published paper B. When I input the author name and his 'final institution', I could get both paper A and B. It will save a lot of time! 

    Howeverr, SSCI does not have such a function.  So I have to figure out all the institutions the author used to be, and I really hate those authors who moved several times.