Citation analysis (Bibliometric tools)

How many times has your publication been cited?

Assessment of research quality is likely to use analysis of citation data (also known as bibliometrics) to measure the impact of publications and citations.

Bibliometrics is a mode by which peers acknowledge each others' research and is considered an indicator of an article's impact and usefulness to the research community.

Citation databases tell us how often a published work has been cited. Note that standard citation measures are not applicable in all disciplines.

Web of Science 1980-

major citation database, covering a wide range of disciplines
shows the number of times a work has been cited in journal articles (note: not books)
click the "Cited Reference Search" link at the main search screen for Web of Science
to get started, view their Cited Reference Search tutorial (6.54 minutes) - click on the link to the tutorial at the Cited Reference search screen

If you need further assistance, contact your research or branch librarian.

However, Web of Science should not be used alone for locating citations to an author or title (Yang, 2006).

Yang, K & Meho, LI (2006) Citation analysis: a comparison of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. In Grove, Andrew, Eds. Proceedings 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) 43. Retrieved 23 January, 2007 from http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00008121/01/Yang_citation.pdf

Other sources of citation counts

Google Scholar

includes how often the work has been cited in other scholarly literature
current strengths are coverage of science and medical databases, open access repositories and single publisher databases
current weaknesses include lack of coverage of social science/humanities databases and an English language bias
note: does not cover material from all major publishers

Publish or Perish

free software (courtesy of harzing.com) for personal, non-profit use
retrieves and analyzes academic citations using Google Scholar and provides a variety of statistics which can be viewed on screen, pasted into other applications or saved in different output formats for further analysis
could give a more complete picture of research output in fields such as business, social sciences, arts and humanities, engineering and computer science
versions are available for Windows or Linux platforms

SciFinder Scholar

good coverage of chemistry and chemically-related life sciences such as biochemistry and pharmacology
available only in the Barr Smith and Waite Libraries, or download the client software for remote access
see the SciFinder Scholar web site for a guide to identifying related citations
for additional help, use the full user guide when online

ScienceDirect

use the Cited by option (note that results are limited to journals and books that are available on ScienceDirect)

Scopus

indexes/abstracts 15,000 peer-reviewed journals from more than 4,000 publishers, including open access journals, conference proceedings and trade publications as well as millions of scientific web pages
covers life sciences, health sciences, physical sciences and social sciences
use Citation Tracker to display (since 1996 only) the number of times an article is cited during a specified time period
author self citations are able to be excluded
extensive Help is available online, including interactive tutorials

Keep track with citation alerts

Receive e-mail alerts on future citations to your article within the same database.

Web of Science - Navigate to the full record for your article, then select Create Citation Alert (requires registration).

Scopus - Document citation alerts notify you by e-mail or RSS feed of newly loaded documents that cite a selected document. A Document Citation Alert can be created from the Records page and the My Alerts page. See the online Help pages for more details.