Google Academics Inc. Methodology
The second structured search targeted papers that explicitly acknowledged Google support. We searched Google Scholar for the concurrence of the policy keywords identified above with acknowledgement language: “grant from Google,” “support from Google,” “funding from Google,” “fellowship from Google,” “Google grant,” “Google fellowship,” “Google funding,” “Google research grant,” “Google * fellowship,” “grateful to Google,” “thanks to Google,” “thank Google," "thanks Google.” An analyst sorted through these papers manually to verify a) Whether the responsive phrase was in fact an acknowledgement of Google support, and b) Relevance to policy issues of interest to Google.
In the final structured search, we compiled a list of all of the authors of papers identified in the second structured search and in anecdotal research, and searched Google Scholar for their names alongside the policy keywords used in the previous two searches. We sought papers by authors who may have acknowledged Google support in one publication but not in other papers addressing the same topic. An analyst manually reviewed the results of this search to verify a) Whether the paper was published after the date of first known Google support, b) Relevance to policy issues of interest to Google, and c) Whether the author acknowledged Google support in the paper.
To construct the citation network, we iterated through our completed database of Google-funded papers on Google Scholar and clicked the “cited by…” link on each article. We gathered data on each article that cited a Google-funded paper. An analyst manually cleaned this data and omitted results in alphabets other than the Latin alphabet, because those citations could not be verified. The resulting network contained nearly 6,000 connections and is too big to display in an interactive visualization. The interactive network graph that accompanies this article shows the 329 Google-funded papers that we identified and all unfunded papers that cite more than one piece of Google-funded scholarship.