Google Scholar does not contain all scholarly material ever published or created so your Google Scholar profile and resulting citation metrics represent a certain section of literature that is indexed by Google Scholar. The quality of Google Scholar citations has been questioned and specifically challenged for inflating citation counts. For instance, it is likely a scholar's h-index in Google Scholar is much higher than in a competing citation index by competitors like Scopus and Web of Science. Some scholars claim that Google Scholar is easily duped by "fake" or predatory scholarly publications.

Google Scholar's algorithm is proprietary so we cannot know exactly how it returns the search results that it does. However, researchers have attempted to reverse-engineer the algorithm and at least one article concludes,

"Citation counts is the highest weighed factor in Google Scholar’s ranking algorithm. Therefore, highly cited articles are found significantly more often in higher positions than articles that have been cited less often. As a consequence, Google Scholar seems to be more suitable for finding standard literature than gems or articles by authors advancing a new or different view from the mainstream."

Keep this in mind when you select Google Scholar to research literature in your discipline.

1. Go to Google Scholar.
2. Sign in or sign up for a new Google account. You can choose to use your UM email address at signup if you do not want to use or create a Google account.
3. Click My Profile in the upper-left corner.
4. Enter your details and ensure that you use your UM email address so your affiliation can be verified. 
5. Google will search for any articles it thinks you've authored and list them. Have a look through the list and check the box to the left of a group if you would like to add a whole group or click on the number of articles to the right of a group to see a list of articles. Don't see an article you authored? You can create an entry manually. First choose the publication type at the top of the form then fill in as many fields as possible.
6. You may have a number of pages of results to check. Use the arrows at the bottom to look through each page, adding records as you go. The first time you do this will be the biggest list to check.
7. We recommend you allow Google Scholar to apply updates automatically so it will capture your publications as they become available in the search engine. You can add and remove items from your profile at any time.
8. Check the box next to 'Make my profile public' to ensure that your profile is visible.
9. In order to verify your affiliation, you will need to respond to the email you receive from Google Scholar.
10. Now that your profile is created you may want to add additional details such as a photo and co-authors.
11. To edit your profile details at any time click on the crayon icon or the Review link to can change your name, institution and email details.
12. To delete articles that have been added to your profile by mistake, check the box to the left of the entry/entries you wish to delete then click on the Delete button that will appear at the top of your list.

If you're doing research and preparing to publish, or already have published works to your name, a Google Scholar profile allows you to customize and showcase publications and how many citations they've received. Google Scholar will then calculate a platform-dependent h-index for you. This profile will also make you more "googleable" across all Google searches and increase your scholarly SEO (search engine optimization).