Assessing research oriented companies with Google Scholar

by Martin Monperrus

How to say that a company is “research oriented”? How to assess this objectively, from the outside? One way to do so is to see if the company publishes research papers, or even better, if the company publishes research papers that matter.

Today, there is a simple way of checking this: Google Scholar. In Google Scholar, you can list all researchers having an email with the same top-level domain name (eg. all researchers with an email ending in @bp.com). By default, Google Scholar ranks researchers by the total number of citations.

This gives you a very clear picture on whether the company is composed of people publishing strong papers.

(Personal note: I was both surprised and impressed by the results)

Top research companies

(biased towards software tech, please comment on this page to add others)

Points of comparison

(sampling with my own bias)

Threats to validity

The main threat to validity is that some people don’t put their main professional email address on their Google Scholar. However, this threat is also a feature: putting your main company email in Scholar reflects your pride and your personal attachment to the company. If people don’t put their company address in their Google Scholar, it may mean that the dissociate their research life and their company life, it may also mean that research is not highly valued in the company itself.

The second threat is that the company may have recruited people after their main research life. This may happen, but in the long term, those people would disseminate a research mindset and research values in the companies.

Some research related people don’t have a Google Scholar account, but this is rare, esp. in technology related fields.

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