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Citation Metrics for Information Science: Home

Last Updated: Jan 8, 2024 3:43 PM

Citation Tracking

Citation tracking refers to a method of measuring the impact of research studies and/or for identifying leading scholars in a particular discipline based upon a systematic analysis of who has cited a particular study, how often a specific research study has been cited by others, and by exploring what disciplines are represented by those subsequent citations.

-- Mavodza, Judith. Citation Tracking in Academic Libraries: An Overview. Oxford, UK: Chandos Publishing, May 2016.

Web of Science

Web of Science is a multidisciplinary research database that provides references plus abstracts and links to selected full text for journal articles (from 1965-present) and other types of information. It incorporates citation data that allows you to identify highly cited papers as well as highly cited authors. Citation reports can be generated in Web of Science for groups of papers, institutions, topical areas, and individual researchers. The video below explains how to generate a citation report for an individual author using the Web of Science Core Collection.

 

Google Scholar

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

About Google Scholar

Scopus

Scopus is considered by many to be the primary competitor to the Web of Science database for citation analysis and journal ranking statistics. Sadly, the UB Libraries does not have access to Scopus as it was too expensive, but if you're interested, here's a video explaining how it works. 

The Scopus website claims this database is the "largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research." It is more international in coverage than Web of Science and the Scopus interface is simple and intuitive to use.

Humanities Librarian

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Molly Poremski
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