The Google Scholar Citation Profile Advantage?

The citation data for my analyses are primarily from Google Scholar (see most recent at: http://tomwsanchez.com/2019-urban-planning-faculty-citation-results/). For awhile now I have suspected that planning faculty with Google Scholar Citation Profiles had higher H-Indices and citation totals, but I had not yet looked at the differences. I assumed that highly cited faculty were more likely to keep track of their citation metrics, and therefore have GS profiles. This appears to be the case. But in my opinion, profiles do not increase the visibility of publications and therefore, citation activity. Publications are mostly searched through GS and not through profiles. There is also the issue of gaming GS profiles by including erroneous publications. While I have seen instances of this, most of it has to do with profiles not being properly maintained. This also includes missing publications which potentially lower citation counts and H-Indices. Anne-Wil Harzing has a very good blog post about this at: https://harzing.com/blog/2018/11/google-scholar-citation-profiles-the-good-the-bad-and-the-better.

See the comparisons below (by rank) and please send me your comments.

Table 1. Mean H-Index

Table 2. Mean citations

Figure 1. Mean H-Index by rank

Figure 2. Mean citations by rank