Citation Analysis
Citation Analysis can be an extremely useful measure of the scholarly impact of an article or other created work.
A citation search is a look forward in time from the publication of one item to later works that reference that item.
Researchers can use citation tracking tools to build references and follow the evolution of ideas, by starting with one seminal article and using it to find other relevant articles.
An author can use citation count tools to monitor and validate the impact of his or her own work.
Web of Science Cited Reference Search
This is the traditional citation research source that uses the Web of Science database to search the citation references of scholarly articles in over 10,000 journals.
Cited Reference Search can be used to:
- Tally the citation count for an article, paper, book or even a work of art.
- Help find variant forms of a citation that might not show in a regular database search.
- List the Web of Science journal articles that cite the item.
- Eliminate self-citations.
- Create a Citation Map for an item.
- Instructions for Using Cited Reference Search in the Web of Science
Google Scholar Citation Search
Google Scholar is a database that includes journal and conference papers, theses and dissertations, academic books, pre-prints, abstracts, technical reports, patents and legal documents.
Search results show citation counts and links to citing articles. These will be primarily from scholarly journals. However, since Google Scholar is not a database of specific journals with clearly defined date ranges, researchers need to be aware of the uncertainty of the coverage.
Instructions for an Article Citation Search in Google Scholar
Altmetrics
The impact of articles and other written output can be measued by more than citation analysis.
Altmetrics are the tools and methods used to study the readership and sharing of online materials, especially material generated in digital sharing media, such as in blogs, collaborative reference managers, bookmarking exchanges and social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and FaceBook.
These are alternative forms of publication that are inadequately represented in traditional citation counts.
Mining the impact of this digital material could provide rich metadata beyond citation and usage counts, to include information about user context, value and perception.
- Altmetrics, a Manifesto"With altmetrics, we can crowdsource peer-review."
- Altmetric.com BookmarkletInstantly get article-level use metrics for any recent paper, for free. The Altmetric.com bookmarklet works for articles that have DOIs.
- Impact StoryBy Jason Priem and Heather Piwowar. "It goes beyond traditional measurements of research output -- citations to papers -- to embrace a much broader evidence of use across a wide range of scholarly output types." Author-centric.
- Scholars seek better ways to track impact online by J. Howard (2012, November 5) The Chronicle of Higher Education."An approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—aims to measure Web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked."
Limitations of Citation Analysis
- Citation tracking is limited to the inventory searched; not every citing work may be included.
- Items can be cited incorrectly or in different forms, leading to missed results.
- Subject relevance, author attitude and the importance of a reference are not measured.
- Citation counts don't measure readership.
- Citing material consists primarily of academic papers; other written material may or may not be included.
Because of these limitations, it's important that researchers use multiple methods to track citations and evaluate the impact of a work.