Personal citation data

How many times has a publication been cited? In ERA terms and for some disciplines, the number of times a publication has been cited is evidence that indicates academic quality.

Sources of citation counts

  • Web of Science (part of the Web of Knowledge)
    The Web of Science is a collection of citation indexes covering science, the social sciences, and arts and humanities literature. Citation indexes tell us how often a published work, such as a journal article, has been cited or referenced in another published work. To search this collection effectively; you require precise bibliographic details of articles, books, conference proceedings etc. Search the database by author, year or title of a particular work. For assistance in searching refer to the Information for new users link on the Web of Science homepage, or contact your Liaison Librarian.
  • Google Scholar
    Until recently, Web of Science was virtually a lone player in the online citation index scene. Other databases are now beginning to emerge. To-date research and evaluation of citations obtained from databases such as Google Scholar has been limited. Scholar searches sources available on the web. Although its content is limited to academic works, the definition of academic and the origin of cited works obtained from Scholar is not clear. Care should be taken in using this data, since examples of duplication, incorrect citations, and of citations by unpublished manuscripts have been found. Citation data derived from Google Scholar can be consolidated for review using a software program: Publish or Perish which can abe downloaded for free. This software has been developed by Anne-Wil Harzing. The program imports Google Scholar raw citations, then analyses these and presents them in various statistical forms.
  • Publishers' Collections
    Citation information - in various forms - is also becoming increasingly available through publishers of online journal collections, including:
  • CiteSeer
    A free resource from Penn State University can be used to obtain citation information. CiteSeer focuses primarily on references in the computing and information science fields. As with Google Scholar, questions exist about the validity of citation information obtained from this database as a measure of quality.

Citation alerts

  • Citation alerts allow provide updates whenever an article/or author you are interested in has been cited in a new article. 
  • You can be also notified when someone is citing you by creating an author alert under your name.
  • Citation alerts are available through the key citation databases Web of Knowledge and Scopus

See an example of how to set up a citation alert for an author (PDF) and a citation alert for an article (PDF) in Scopus.

Resources

More information about citation tools is available in the following articles:

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9th March 2011