Blog Archives

Citation analysis tool – Web of Science

This is one of a series of posts describing tools that are available for citation analysis.  For other tools see here.

Web of Science is one of the leading databases of scholarly research articles, covering a broad range of subject areas.  As a commercially provided database it features a number of added value services, including a sophisticated search function, links to cited and citing papers, citation reporting and an alerting service.

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Citation analysis tool – Google Scholar

This is one of a series of posts describing tools that are available for citation analysis.  For other tools see here.

Google Scholar is the ‘academic’ version of the popular Google search engine.  It covers scholarly literature from a range of sources, including “academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites” (Google, 2011). What Google doesn’t tell us are the names of these sources (i.e. which publishers, journals etc. are harvested) or the frequency of updates.  This means that we cannot be certain how comprehensive a search is or how up-to-date.

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Citation analysis tool – Microsoft Academic Search

This is one of a series of posts describing tools that are available for citation analysis.  For other tools see here.

Like Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search  indexes millions of scholarly papers but unlike the Google product it offers a range of extra features, among them citation counts and the facility to follow citation paths.

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Tools for citation analysis

FAQ: How can I find out which works are most cited?

Even though the decision has been made not to use citation counts as the primary measure of research excellence in REF2014, there are several good reasons why you might be interested in the number of times your work, or that of others, has been cited. For example:

  • to measure and track the uptake of specific research outputs by the scholarly community
  • to enhance bids for funding
  • to demonstrate personal, group and institutional research performance
  • to support career advancement

In this series of posts I will introduce some of the tools that you can use for citation analysis and explain briefly how you can access them.

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