This page is designed to bring together library resources and services that would be useful to anyone doing citation analysis.
The field of bibliometrics is increasingly being used to evaluate the impact of a scholar's work or the importance of a journal in a particular field. The guidance provided here will steer you through the process of gathering this information.
It is important to remember that judging the quality of a publication, whether it is an entire journal or a particular journal article, is ultimately a subjective process. Results can vary depending on which criteria are used, how measurements are made, how much information is available, and so on. Some disciplines have more established rankings than others. Also the situation changes regularly as new resources are developed that try to provide this information. If you have questions about this process for your specific situation, please contact your subject specialist.
Citation analysis is the study of the impact and assumed quality of an article, an author, or an institution based on the number of times works and/or authors have been cited by others. Citation analysis is useful for a variety of reasons:
The h-index, or Hirsch index, measures the impact of a particular scientist rather than a journal. "It is defined as the highest number of publications of a scientist that received h or more citations each while the other publications have not more than h citations each."1 For example, a scholar with an h-index of 5 had published 5 papers, each of which has been cited by others at least 5 times. See instructions below for finding the h-index using Web of Science, Scopus (ScienceDirect) and Publish or Perish (downloadable from Harzing.com).
Note that an individual's h-index may be very different in different databases. This is because the databases index different journals and cover different years. For instance, Scopus only considers work from 1996 or later, while the Web of Science calculates an h-index using all years included in an institution's subscription. (So a Web of Science h-index might look different when searched through different institutions.)
1 Schreiber, M. (2008a). An empirical investigation of the g-index for 26 physicists in comparison with the h-index, the A-index, and the R-index. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(9), 1513.
The Web of Science database (composed of: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, Science Citation Index Expanded, Conference Proceedings Citation Index, and Book Citation Index) is THE original citation research source and, along with Google Scholar, is the most interdisciplinary and most comprehensive citation resource available to the FSU community. Web of Science extracts the citation information from the articles in over 12,000 journals from almost every discipline.
But...
A citation search in Web of Science is not a complete citation search:
Scholar
Google Scholar is a free search engine that indexes a variety of scholarly information, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports from a broad area of research. If the article has been cited by others, a cited by link will be part of the record. Clicking on that link will take you to the list of articles that cited the found item. Google Scholar searching is generally faster than either Web of Science or Scopus.
But...
For information about how to use Google Scholar, see Google Scholar's Help pages.
Google Scholar Citations
In November 2011, Google Scholar added a new option called Google Scholar Citations. Authors can use this service to compute citation metrics and track them over time. To get started, go to Google Scholar Citations. Create a profile, and then choose the articles or groups of articles you wish to track. You have the option of keeping your profile private.
Publish or Perish (PoP)
PoP is a downloadable software providing enhanced analysis of Google Scholar citation data. For more information and access to the software, see Publish or Perish on the Harzing.com website.
Certain disciplines, journals, and document types may not be well represented in the more traditional sources for citation analysis, such as Web of Science. In this situation, it becomes necessary to find alternative sources for locating citations to an author or published work. This section identifies some databases that provide bibliometric data from their interfaces.
Provides full-text access to Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) transactions, journals, magazines and conference proceedings published since 1988 and all current and draft IEEE standards.
JSTOR is a digital library of academic content in many formats and disciplines. The collections include top peer-reviewed scholarly journals as well as respected literary journals, academic monographs, research reports from trusted institutes, and diverse primary sources. FSU has access to JSTOR’s Archive, Artstor, Primary Sources, and Global Plants collections.
A comprehensive database covering the world's mathematical literature. Over 1700 current serials and journals reviewed in whole or in part may be viewed in PDF format.
Provides access to the full-text of more than 200 scholarly journals published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Subjects include art, anthropology, classics, culture and society, demographics, economics, folklore, history, language, literature, mathematics, medicine and health, philosophy, politics, religion, science, sociology, etc. Coverage varies according to title (1993).
Wiley Online Library features 1,500 journals, over 14,000 books, and hundreds of multi-volume reference works, databases, and other resources.
Here is a quick summary of what to expect from the three best-known citation analysis tools:
| Web of Science | Scopus* (No FSU access) | Google Scholar | |
| Subject Focus |
Science, Technology, |
Science, Technology, Medical, Engineering, Arts & Humanities | Medical, Scientific, Technical, Business, Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities |
| Components |
Composed of 5 citation indexes:
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| Coverage | Over 12,000 journals | 19,400 active journals | Unknown |
| Time Span | Some journal files going back to 1900; see above for more detail |
49 million records, of which
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Theoretically, whatever is available on the Internet |
| Updated | Weekly | 1-2 Times a week | Monthly on average |
| Strengths |
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| Weaknesses |
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Information on this page has been adapted from guides created at University of Ottawa Bibliotheque, University of Connecticut Library, and updated using the Thomson Reuters Web of Science Fact Sheet, Scopus Content Overview, and Scopus Content Coverage Guide (January 2013).
Tutorials for Citation Research:
Tutorials for Creating Email Alerts:
List of Titles Covered:
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