This page is created to provide researchers with the information on how many times a publication has been cited.
Searching for cited articles may be useful for conducting research for the following reasons:
- Find other works on your research topic.
- Find other researchers with similar research interests.
- Check the “importance” of a particular work by finding out how many other authors/works have cited it.
By searching for a cited articles you can:
- Count citations: find out how many others have cited a given work.
- Make cited reference search: find out which articles have cited a certain previously published work.
- Create citation alerts: find out when a newly published article cites a certain previously published work.
- Receive statistics relating to an author.
Links
Sources
Web of Science – is a most trusted global citation database, which besides it’s large scope and coverage, is also used for citation indexing and analysis as standard in academic institutions worldwide.
The database is multidisciplinary.
Access to the database is provided by the Technion Libraries.
Scopus – one of the most comprehensive database with coverage of more than 22,000 journal titles and many options for narrow down search results by keywords, years, affiliation and more. The database is also used as a citation index tool and for citation analysis.
The database is multidisciplinary.
Access to the database is provided by the Technion Libraries.
Google Scholar – is the most comprehensive database for academic literature. Google Scholar Citations provide a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics.
The database is multidisciplinary.
Access is free.
iCite – provides bibliometric information for journal articles that have been included in the PubMed database.
MathSciNet – is the leading mathematics indexing and abstracting database that it incorporates the content of the American Mathematical Society’s Mathematical Reviews. The Citations tab provides searches of citation information for authors, journals, subjects, and years.
PubMed – comprises more than 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
Access to the database is provided by the Technion Libraries.
SciFinder – allows you to search academic articles and patents related to life sciences with specialty to chemistry.
The database provides with cited and citing references. New users must register first.
Access to the database is provided by the Technion Libraries.
Semantic Scholar – is a free database of millions of scholarly publications in the fields of computer science and neuroscience. It is designed to highlight the most important and influential papers, and to identify the connections between them.
Things to consider
Number of citations depends on source’s content and coverage.
WOS
- Citation data only for the records indexed by database.
- Limited number of journals.
- European bias.
- Calculates the H-index of an author from 1965 – current.
- Limited number of journals in non-English languages.
- Clear results from scholarly journals.
- “In press” articles are not indexed because of editorial policy.
- Only in their final form.
- Self-citations exclusion option.
- Access via subscription.
SCOPUS
Citation data only for the records indexed by database.
More content (about 22,000 journals) than in WOS (about 12,000 journals).
- American bias.
- Calculates the H-index of an author from 1996 – current.
- Scopus Cited References Expansion Program ensures cited references going back to 1970 will be added to pre-1996 Scopus content in the fourth quarter of 2014.
- Limited number of journals in non-English languages.
- Clear results from scholarly journals.
- One version of a paper in results.
- “In press” articles are included.
- Self-citations exclusion option.
- Access via subscription.
GOOGLE SCHOLAR
- Scholar’s work may be published in journals not covered by WOS and Scopus.
- Larger number of journals than in WOS and Scopus *not all scholarly journals are indexed in Google Scholar.
- Larger number of publications in non-English languages than in WOS and Scopus.
- Affection on value of H-index of additional irrelevant citations results from nonscholarly citations (records from unknown sources and informal material).
- Not all of them are of the same quality as those found in the Web of Science or Scopus.
- In some cases Scholar indexes preprint and journal version of a paper and provides in the results the sum of the two counts, so citations are spread over the duplicates.
- Provides an H-index only for researchers who created a user profile for themselves.
- Counts self-citations.
- Freely accessibly from the internet.
The optimal methodology to count citations is to consult Google Scholar in addition to Web of Science or Scopus.
- Disciplines that use more references per paper is expected to drive up the Impact Factor of the journal.
- The same journal may be ranked differently depending on the category being reviewed.Different disciplines have different standards for citation.
It is unfair to compare H-index of researchers working in different disciplines:
- Discipline that uses more references per paper is expected to have higher index.
- Researchers in specialist subject may have lower h-index than those in more popular or currently-topical areas.
- Coverage in different disciplines is not the same in different sources.
Journals indexed in the WOS cover mainly the core disciplines in the natural sciences.
Journals indexed in the WOS and Scopus do not sufficiently cover fields such as computer science.
Journals indexed in the WOS do not sufficiently cover field of engineering science as well.
Google Scholar coverage in such science disciplines like Biology, Chemistry and Physics is less than in WOS or Scopus. Google Scholar coverage for the four Social science disciplines: Education, Economics, Sociology and Psychology as well as Computing is higher than in WOS and Scopus.
Number of Google Scholar citations for mathematicians and computer scientists higher than the WOS and Scopus, but lower for high-energy physicists.
Large and small journals are compared equally.
Smaller or more specialized journals will tend to have smaller Impact Factors.
How to: instructions and guides
Web of Science Core Collection – Cited Reference Searching Series
The Guide by Reference and Information Department:
Web of Science Database Provides Some Options to Find Citations:
Basic Search
To find out how many others have cited a given work, choose ‘Title’ search option from the search box in Basic Search, enter the work title and click ‘Search’.
Result’s screen displays the number of citations for a given work.
To see the list of articles that have cited a given work, click on the number of ‘Times Cited’:
Note: In the list you can see the citing articles only from subscribed databases.
To see more information about ‘Times Cited Counts’, click ‘View Additional Times Cited Counts’.
Cited Reference Search
To find out how many others have cited a given work, choose one or more of the search options in the search box in Cited Reference Search:
- Last name of author and first name initial.
- Abbreviated journal title (or select from journal abbreviations list).
- Cited year or years if available.
Then click ‘Search’.
Result’s screen will display the number of citations for a given work.
To find out which articles have cited a work, select the reference and click ‘Finish Search’.
Cited Reference Searching in Scopus (Submitted by Aileen on Mon, 02/17/2020)