Citation Analysis and Metrics: Citation Analysis
Citation Analysis
What is it?
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.
Why use it?
- To find out how much impact a particular article has had by showing which authors based some work upon it or cited it as an example in within their own papers.
- To find out more about a field or topic, i.e., by reading the papers that cite a seminal work in that area.
- To determine how much impact a particular author has had by looking at the number of times their work has been cited by others.
Limitations
- There is no one tool or system that completely measures impact. Each database or tool uses its own (often proprietary) measurement systems and data.
- It is difficult to use these tools to compare across disciplines that have different research and publication practices.
- Citation counts are not a measure of quality of the work.
Resources
Below, are quick instructions for finding citation counts for pubications in three of the most frequently-used citation analysis tools: Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar.
- More detailed guidance can be found in this library guide (restricted to Rice users)
Quick citation counts for publications
Web of Science
To find citation counts in Web of Science:
- Navigate to Web of Science (information about accessing databases off-campus can be found in this guide)
- Search by the document's title
- In the results list, the citation count is found to the right of the title
- To see what documents cited the publication, click on the citation count
Scopus
To find citation counts in Scopus:
- Navigate to Scopus (information about accessing databases off-campus can be found in this guide)
- Search by the document's title
- In the results list, the citation count is found to the right of the title
- To see what documents cited the publication, click on the citation count
Google Scholar
To find citation counts in Google Scholar:
- Navigate to Google Scholar
- Enter the title of the document using quotation marks
- The citation count will appear below the title and abstract, as "Cited by #"
- To see what documents cited the publication, click on the citation count
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