Identifying leaders in the field

When trying to evaluate articles, studies and methods, it really helps to know who's who in your field of research - in short, to know who other people think are the leaders in the field.

You can now find out by doing a search to identify which articles and authors are cited most often. This is called a citation search.

Tracing who has cited the work of an individual author, or finding out which are the most frequently cited articles, is made easier through a database called Web of Science. This database indexes scholarly journals that are highly regarded within the areas of the Sciences, Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities.

If an author's work has been cited, Web of Science can tell you where and when. This may lead you to other research articles relevant to your topic that you had not found. It may also make analysis of the original article easier - you can see what other people have thought of it.

Finally, a citation search reveals the links that exist among researchers and projects. This helps to establish a sense of the field you're working in and the level of interest in your particular topic.

Other indexing databases are beginning to add a Cited By feature for individual bibliographic citations, for example PsycINFO, a key database for Behavioural Science. Cited By links in Google Scholar also identify other papers that have cited articles in your topic search.

View a worked example of citation search through Web of Science.