Background: Large comparative surveys are designed to provide relevant and reliable secondary data on social processes to a wide range of academic audiences, as well as answer the needs of policy makers for making informed decisions and identify emerging social trends. Based on bibliographic information obtained via Google Scholar indexing system the paper seeks to explore patterns of academic usage of four large cross-national surveys in year 2012: ESS, EVS, WVS and ISSP.

Methods: Relevant Google Scholar hits for year 2012 will be coded into an SPSS data file, enabling statistical comparisons of publication patterns across the four surveys according to type of publication, topics analysed, author affiliation and language of publication.

Study aims: The main analytical question the paper will address is whether the ranking of topics analysed in academic publications is similar in all four surveys, or can survey specific patterns be identified. In other words, are there topic-specific patterns of secondary analysis associated with survey characteristics (particularly the content of the questionnaire), or is topic choice independent of a survey and determined primarily by the general societal context and burning policy issues? In the methods section, the paper will also critically assess Google Scholar as a tool for monitoring bibliographic outputs and propose several steps to filter Google Scholar hits by the criteria of relevance to optimize results.