Citation Searching Isabel Holowaty Juliet Ralph

Aim What is it How does it work Features & Pitfalls Demonstrations Hands-on Questions

Citation indexing Invented in 1961 by Eugene Garfield at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Scientific abstracting/indexing services began in 19th century, recording author/title/publisher/journal for articles and indexing them Garfield added details of all references quoted in the article and indexed them too, publishing results as Science Citation Index (SCI) – originally only in printed form Allowed for many new ways of linking articles

Many new ways? For an article you’ve read: Find the earlier articles it refers to Find later articles which quoted it Find related articles which quote some of the same references as this one So you can trace the progress of ideas backwards, sideways and, uniquely, forwards in time

Why bother? Discover who is citing your research, or that of a colleague, or noted authority Identify sources of information that competitors are consulting for their research Assess the impact of an article

Originally Using the paper Science Citation Index was hard work Now, the electronic version is much quicker But can be complex and confusing – important to understand what it does and doesn’t do The basic concept of linking documents which cite each other, and ranking them according to the frequency with which they do so, underpins search engines like Google

Want to know more? Wikipedia

What is the Web of Science? Indexes to the journal literature across all subjects Science Citation Index Social Science Citation Index Arts and Humanities Citation Index Conference Proceedings Web of Science (WoS) is a product offered on the platform Web of Knowledge (WoK), alongside other products including Journal Citation Reports which gives journal impact factors. Direct access available on Oxford network; outside Oxford log in using Single Sign-On

Searching options 1. To find journal articles or book reviews (Search) 2. To find articles citing a particular work (Cited Reference Search)

General search

Cited Reference search (Reverse look-up)

Cited Reference search

Features All content of a journal is indexed, not just articles Find illustrations of artistic or musical works Citation reports & analysis Author affiliation searches Alerts New articles on your subject Citation alerts

Pitfalls Foreign language titles are translated! Cited works are heavily abbreviated, inconsistently referenced and frequently wrong Check for Cited Reference Variants Remember to save results per page

Cited Reference links everywhere Now a feature of many databases Scopus (science, medicine and social sciences) Historical Abstracts Medline, Embase, PsycInfo, BIOSIS Previews …and other life science databases on the Ovid platform Each reference to a paper shows the number of times it has been cited in that database Look for links such as “Cited by”, “Citing articles”

Cited references in Google Scholar References include ‘cited by’ data based on articles known to Google Scholar Entries ranked by number of cites Not possible to save sets or analyse Still useful for tracking research

Related records Find similar articles based on shared references. Links now appear in databases such as Web of Science Databases on Ovid platform PubMed Google Scholar

Questions Web of Science tutorial For further help contact your subject librarian – see