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Journalism - Maximizing Research Impact & Identity: Article Impact

Tips, techniques & links to help you find answers for your research papers & projects

Citation Tracking

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Citation analysis influences decisions about faculty hiring, retention, and promotion as well as departmental evaluations. Entire universities are now judged by how often their faculty are cited.

With so much at stake, users of citation analysis, also known as "bibliometrics," need to consider how citation statistics are compiled and how they differ between disciplines (and even within a discipline).Citation analysis has pitfalls and biases that may misrepresent the scholarly contributions of social scientists.

 

Citation Tracking Tools

  • Includes journal articles in medicine, science, social sciences, and arts & humanities. 
  • Search for a particular work, then click the number under Cited by.
  • Search for a particular author, select the correct author, and click the number under Cited by for each article.
  • Includes journal articles (in Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Index databases), conference proceedings (in Conference Proceedings Citation Index), and books (in Book Citation Index database).
  • Use Cited Reference Search to see how many times a particular work or author has been cited.
  • Search for a particular work, then click on the number that follows Times Cited. 
  • Create a Citation Alert to be notified of when a particular work is cited.
  • The following EBSCOhost databases allow citation tracking: Academic Search Complete (multi-disciplinary); America: History & Life; Business Source Complete; CINAHL (nursing & allied health); Communication & Mass Media Complete; EconLit; Environment Complete; GreenFILE (environmental studies); Historical Abstracts; Hospitality & Tourism;  Information Science & Technology Abstracts;  Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts;  PsycARTICLES & PsycINFO.
  • Click on Cited References at top of page (sometimes found under More tab). Search for a particular author or work. Select works, then click Find Citing Articles. 
  • Includes journal articles in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences. 
  • Search for a particular author or work. Click (number) Items Citing This Item to see citing works within the JSTOR database. 

Google Scholar indexes journal articles, books, book chapters and other non-traditional sources such as promotional pages, table of contents pages, course reading lists etc.

  • Click Items Citing This Item to see citing works in Google Scholar. 

Eigen Factor & Article Influence

Eigenfactor.org logoEigenfactor and Journal Article Influence scores are released annually by the University of Washington's www.eigenfactor.org (free). The underlying data come from Journal Citation Reports. 

A journal's Article Influence is a measure of the average influence of its articles over the first five years after publication. It is similar in interpretation to Journal Citation Report's Impact Factor. 

A journal's Eigenfactor is a measure of the journal's overall importance to the research community. It considers not just direct citations to a journal's articles but rather the entire network of citations that are linked to that journal's articles. 

Bergstrom, C.T., West, J. D. & Wiseman, M. A. (2008).  The Eigenfactor metrics.  Journal of Neuroscience. 28(45): 11433-11434; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0003-08.2008.

Scholarly Impact of Books and Conference Papers

Finding Citation Counts for Books and Book Chapters

A number of disciplines, especially in the Social Sciences and the Arts & Humanities publish their research in books and other types of publications. These disciplines are not that well served by traditional tools of citation analysis such as Web of Science and Scopus that primarily focus on journal literature. So how do you gauge the scholarly impact of your books and chapters in books? Listed below are a few strategies, while they are not perfect or comprehensive, they can help you collect some relevant data:

  • Scopus: Along with citation and abstract, Scopus includes references (bibliography) for articles indexed within the database.
    • In the Basic Search tab, enter your book or book chapter title and limit your search to References from the drop-down box. This will find all items indexed in Scopus where your book or book chapter appears in the List of References. This is not a comprehensive search result.
  • Web of Science: Citations to book chapters, conference papers and proceedings are available from Web of Science.
  • WorldCat: The WorldCat is a catalog that reflects the holdings of libraries around the world. It contains records for the following types of materials: books, journals, musical scores, computer data files, magazines, newspapers, computer programs, manuscripts, sound recordings, films and slides, maps, and videotapes.
    • To assess the scholarly impact of your books, search each title in WorldCat and in each relevant record, check the “Libraries Worldwide” field. It will tell you how many Libraries own that item and also provide the names of the Libraries.
  • Google Scholar: As mentioned elsewhere in this guide, Google Scholar’s strength lies in the fact that it not only indexes journal articles but also books, book chapters and other non-traditional sources such as promotional pages, table of contents pages, course reading lists etc.
    • Caveats: Google Scholar is not as sophisticated as Scopus or Web of Science. It cannot remove self-citations and so you have to look for them yourself which can be time-consuming. It sometimes has multiple entries for one work which can inflate results.