Citation Impact
Citation impact provides a measure based on the number of citations of scholarly works in other scholarly publications. Citation metrics are usually calculated at article level, but they can also be used to calculate author and journal impact metrics.
Databases such as Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar provide citation counts for individual articles.
- Web of ScienceChoose Search or Author Search. Web of Science provides multidisciplinary coverage of over 12,300 high-impact journals, reports, conference proceedings and books. It covers Sciences well, but has a limited coverage for Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities.
If your publications are not indexed by Web of Science (WoS) it is possible to search the indexed journals, conference papers, books in WoS for citations to your publications using the 'Cited Reference' search. - Scopus (Elsevier)Choose Document or Author Search. Scopus is a comprehensive scientific, medical, technical and social science database. It covers over 20,800 peer-reviewed journals, trade publications, book series and conference proceedings. Citation data goes back to 1996, but Scopus is currently undergoing a large expanding pre 1996 collection expansion project.
It’s also possible to find citations in Scopus to documents that are not indexed in Scopus, e.g. articles published before 1996 or books/chapters. Scopus uses the references lists of the indexed documents to find these citations. e.g. Business research by Collis & Hussey. A search in Scopus yields no results, but when you click the link 'secondary documents', a list of documents found in the reference lists of documents in Scopus is displayed.
- Publish or PerishPublish or Perish is a free downloadable program. It uses Google Scholar to obtain citations, then analyses these citations and presents a wide range of citation metrics. Google Scholar consists of scholarly articles including journal papers, conference papers, reports and theses. Note, the quality of data varies.
Search a range of databases that provide citation counts since Web of Science and Scopus do not cover all disciplines well. There are a number of databases that can help you to count citations. However, they will not provide tools to analyse citations.
- Academic Search Complete (EBSCO)[Cited references]
- Business Source Complete (EBSCO)[cited references]
- Google Scholar[Cited by]
- HeinOnline[Cited by]
- JSTOR[Search] Provides a list of Most Accessed and Most Cited titles per journal
- MathSciNet (AMS)[Citations]
- PsycINFO (Ovid)[Cited by]
- Sociological Abstracts (ProQuest)[Cited by]
- SSRN eLibrary[Citations]
- FactivaFactiva provides access to the latest business and industry news. It is a valuable research tool for many disciplines, including political science, media studies, business, technology studies, social science, journalism, the arts, and more. The database allows users to browse through a collection of global content sources from 200 countries, in 26 languages – including newspapers, continuously updated newswires from Dow Jones and Reuters, journals and magazines, websites, blogs, and multimedia.
- TVNews (Informit)TVNews indexes Australian television news, current affairs and selected documentaries from the free-to-air networks with links to the digitised video content in a compressed format. All individual stories from a particular broadcast are indexed with a detailed synopsis. TVNews is updated daily, with stories appearing on an evening news broadcast generally being available for access the next morning. Key titles include: Australian Story, Catalyst, Current Affair, Dateline, Foreign Correspondent, Four Corners, Insiders, Insight, Landline, Lateline, Meet the Press, Q and A, Today Tonight, World News Australia, and many more. Coverage commences with September 2007 and is updated daily.
- Australia & New Zealand Newsstand (ProQuest)ProQuest Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) Newsstand offers access to leading Australian and New Zealand newspapers. Combining content from Fairfax Australia and Fairfax New Zealand, News Limited, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and APP newswires, ANZ Newsstand provides the very latest local, regional and national news.
Tips
Keep track of your process of counting citations. For example, record the databases you used, and whether you included or removed self-citations.
In Web of Science use the name of the first author of an article since secondary authors are not always found in the Cited Reference searches.
Tutorial
No citation tool will provide a complete citation count. Variations occur because citation tools have different source materials, date ranges and sometimes erroneous records.
See below an example of distribution of citations of a book in Bar-Ilan, J. (2010) Citations to the “Introduction to informetrics” indexed by WOS, Scopus and Google Scholar. Scientometrics, 82(3), p.504.
Note also that citation counts are not comparable across disciplines. For example, citation counts in Social Sciences and Humanities are lower because researchers are more often publishing in books and conference papers that are not well covered by citation databases.