Citation tracking
Learning Objectives
By the end of this module, you will be able to
- explain the principle of citation tracking
- track citations using Web of Science
- track citations using Google Scholar
- track citations using other databases.
Why track citations?
Citation tracking is the method used to discover how many times a particular article has been cited by other articles. The usual tool employed for this purpose is a citation index.
Citation tracking is one of the means by which you can determine the quality of an article. As a general rule, high quality articles attract a high number of citations.
The fact that an article appears in a high-quality peer-reviewed journal does not mean that it is actually good research. Poor quality articles appear in even the most prestigious journals. Dr Drummond Rennie, a former editor of the JAMA, observed over twenty years ago that:
There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print.
Citation counts are not perfect. They are influenced by a number of factors. Review articles (which survey a broad field of knowledge) are sometimes more often cited than their quality would warrant. Poor quality papers can be cited while being criticised or refuted. Conversely, high quality articles can languish, uncited and unread.
The importance of citation tracking
Citation indexes allows you to search the academic literature in ways that illuminate the progress of academic debate in your field. With a citation index, you can easily identify the most influential articles, and the leading academic authorities. You can track backwards (using lists of cited articles) and forwards (using lists of articles which cite a particular article). As a result, you can determine the position of academic debate at any time in the past.
Citation tracking is an excellent means of identifying the response of the academic community to individual articles. You can easily find refutations, criticisms, corrections and retractions of published articles.
In addition, citation tracking provides you with a means of analysing the direction and pace of research trends. You can use this method to identify emerging areas of research.
Citation tracking complements other search strategies. Standard search methods depend on keywords or controlled vocabularies. The success of these techniques depends on a number of factors. For example, a search on the greenhouse effect will miss articles which refer to global warming or climatic change. Citation tracking often allows you to find relevant articles or books that might be missed by a conventional search.
Which indexes allow you to track citations?
The major citation index is Thomson-ISI's Web of Science. Web of Science includes three separate parts: Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI).
Google Scholar is another useful database for citation tracking. Articles in the Google Scholar database are linked to articles and books which refer to them.
Web of Science is the best known and most comprehensive citation index. We will therefore begin by learning its use.
Logging onto Web of Science
To search Web of Science, you need to go to Thomson-ISI's Web of Knowledge platform. Follow these steps:
- Go to Web of Knowledge.
- Enter your UNE username and password if prompted.
- Click on the Web of Science tab.
- Click on the Cited Reference Search link.
- Choose which citation index you would like to use by clicking in the check box next to the index title. The options are: Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts and Humanities Citation Index. You can search across one or more of these indexes at once.
- Check that the default date is set to all years.
Now you only need to enter the details of your search.
Cited reference searching
For practice, we will find the authors who have referenced the following journal article:
J R Petit, J Jouzel and D Raynaud, et al. (1999) "Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica" Nature, 399 (6735): 429-436.
To find articles which have cited this article, we follow these steps:
- Enter the name of the first author (in this case J R Petit) in the Cited Author box. Web of Science expects the author's name to follow the format: Petit J* (using * means that you will find all authors with last name Petit and the first initial J, including those who have second initials). The name of the author can be in upper, lower or mixed case.
- Enter the standard abbreviation for the journal In the Cited Work box. In this case the abbreviation is nature. If you don't know the correct abbreviation, click on the cited work index link or the Thomson ISI list of journal abbreviations link.
- Enter the year in which the article was published (1999) in the Cited Year box.
- Click on the Search button.
Web of Science presents you with a list of matching articles. Note that there are sometimes a number of variant citations. These are usually the results of minor citation errors by article authors.
Click in the check boxes next to the matching citations and then click on the Finish Search button.
Web of Science will present you with a complete list of articles which cite our original article.
Creating a marked List
From this list of results, you can create a marked list of selected items. This list can then be printed, saved or emailed. In addition, you can download them to EndNote as a single set of citations.
To create a marked list:
- Scroll down to the Output Records box.
- Choose your options under Step 1.
- Choose your options under Step 2.
- Choose your options under Step 3. You can print, save, export or e-mail your marked list.
Secondary cited author searching
Web of Science allows you to search by a second or subsequent author if the article was published after 1997.
For example, you can look up the references to the article by J R Petit, J Jouzel and D Raynaud et al. by entering jouzel j* or raynaud d* as the cited author.
However, in order to retrieve the maximum number of hits, you must perform a cited reference search on the first author listed (Petit in this example). The reason is that some citations in the Web of Science database will include no more than the first author name.
Cited reference searching variations
Author names are sometimes indexed differently in the Web of Science citation indexes.
To retrieve all the variations, enter punctuated or multipart names in their joined and unjoined forms.
For example, if the cited author is Lisa Lobry de Bruyn, try debruyn l* or de bruyn l*.
Removing self-citations
It is often desirable to remove self-citations (occasions when an author cites his or her own work). Self-citations can inflate the apparent impact of an academic work, particularly if an author is prolific and prone to multiple citation of his or her earlier works.
If you want to remove self-citations, go to the Advanced Search mode. First, search and find all the articles citing the article in which you are interested and click on the Finish Search button. Then, click on Search and search for the article author's name as Author (not Cited Author). Finally, combine this set of results with your previous set using the NOT operator: "#1 NOT #2".
Limitations of Web of Science
Although Web of Science is the often the best place to begin your citation tracking, this source has significant limitations. These include:
- coverage is heavily biased in favour of English-language journals. If a foreign-language journal does not provide a summary of its article contents in English, ISI simply omits the journal from its database, no matter how prestigious or important the journal.
- coverage outside science, technology and medicine is thin: the Social Science Citation Index indexes fewer than 3% of social science journals world-wide.
- misspellings of author names and incorrect citations are common. This makes it difficult to be certain that there are no missing citations.
- coverage outside of the US (other than for the UK and the Netherlands) is extremely limited.
- books are not included in the Social Science Citation Index.
It is equally important to note that UNE subscription to the Web of Knowledge indexes is only from 1987 onwards. However, Library staff can run an online search on earlier years on request.
Many researchers have turned to Google Scholar as an alternative to Web of Science.
Citation tracking in Google Scholar
Google Scholar offers citation totals for journal articles and other items in its database. If an article in Google Scholar has been cited by another source, a Cited by link will appear below the article entry in Google Scholar's search results. Clicking the Cited by link will display a list of articles that have cited the original article. As many of these articles are also likely to display a Cited by link, this process can be repeated many times.
Even when you use the Cited by link, the citations you see are not restricted to articles in academic journals. They include citations in books (both academic and popular) research reports, dissertations, conference proceedings, and article pre-prints/post-prints.
Google Scholar and its critics Although Google Scholar has attracted enormous attention, it is not without its critics. Professor Péter Jascó, an information scientist at the University of Hawaii, is one of the harshest. He concluded that "for scholarly research the breadth of coverage is not sufficient, the implementation is sloppy and the software options are inferior." Not suprisingly, Thomson ISI, the publishers of Web of Science, are happy to give prominence to the results of his research. (Dr Jascó is also an online columnist for Gale, one of Thomson's sister companies.) Although harsh, Dr Jascó is not entirely wrong. The citation counts which Google Scholar reports cannot be taken at face value. This is because Google occasionally misidentifies citations or includes duplicate citations. Each item needs to be checked. Despite this flaw, Google Scholar will remain a useful tool for citation indexing. As long as Web of Science excludes over 90% of journals in the social sciences and humanities (and many non-English language journals), researchers will continue to use tools such as Google Scholar to plug the gaps. |
Other sources of citations
Although Web of Science and Google Scholar record citations across a range of disciplines, there are also a number of specialised indexes that can assist you to track citations within a discipline. These include:
- CSA Illumina: Where a CSA-hosted index provides a list of article references (eg BioOne or PsycINFO), it will also include the information how often a particular reference has been cited by other articles in the CSA database.
- ERIC: If an article has been cited by another article in the ERIC database, ERIC will display this information in the original article record.
- HighWire: HighWire informs you if an article in its database has been cited by one or more other HighWire articles. Click on View Citation Map next to the article details in the list of search results.
- HeinOnline: This source now has cited by features to indicate important law journal article. For further information, see the online guide.
- IngentaConnect: article abstracts will sometimes include an Articles that cite this article? link.
- Institute of Physics (IoP): The abstracts for articles in IoP journals will often contain links to All Citing Articles.
- JSTOR. JSTOR notes when an article has been cited by other articles in the JSTOR database. Look for a tab reading Articles Citing this Article on the Article Information page. JSTOR also allows you to check for citations in the GoogleScholar database.
- ScienceDirect. Article abstracts in ScienceDirect frequently include provide totals of citing articles derived from Scopus (a database of journal citations produced by Elsevier, the publisher of ScienceDirect.
- SpringerLink: This database uses Cross-Ref to provide links from its articles to citing articles. Citing articles are displayed in the article abstract under Referenced by.
- Wiley InterScience: Wiley is another journal provider which uses Cross-Ref to provide links from articles to citing articles. Click on citation tracking in the article abstract to discover a list of citing articles.
No citation index will give you a complete citation count. Even Web of Science (arguably the most comprehensive citation index available) provides only a partial coverage. By searching a number of indexes you can gain a better idea of the actual citation count for a particular article.
Summary
This module dealt with the following
- the principle of citation tracking
- how to track citations using Web of Science
- how to track citations using Google Scholar
- how to track citations using other databases.
 | Self-test Try these quick self-test questions to assess what you have learnt from this module. |