Tenurometer is a Firefox addon that works with Google Scholar…

“to facilitate citation analysis and help evaluate the impact of an author’s publications.”

Sadly the makers of the addon are dangerously wrong, in writing that…

“Google Scholar provides excellent coverage”

Scholar provides only very marginal coverage of several thousand independent and open access titles in the arts and humanities. Another problem might arise from the fact that it also indexes repositories and home-pages, as well as journals. Further problems with using Google Scholar for assessing impact have been discussed elsewhere by others.

One other thing that goes unexplained is how to access Tenurometer once you’ve installed it. It’s an addon that’s counter-intuitively accessed under the “View” menu rather than “Tools”/Add-ons. To turn it on you need to go to…

Then you get…

You need to type “p” to get a drop-down predefined list of subject tags.

At the moment, it’s painfully slow — taking over a minute to process a simple History subject area query for author Klaus Graf. Finally, after six erroneous pages of medical papers Tenurometer offered a correct link to: “Reich und Land in der sudwestdeutschen Historiographie um 1500”. The “filter results by subject area” option still needs some heavy work, it seems.