Library Guides: Citation and Journal Measures: Citation Searching

What is Citation Searching?

Citation Searching allows you to:

Determine how many times a particular article has been cited
See those citing articles. This allows you to move forward from a seminal work and discover what new research is based on that earlier research.

Google Scholar
includes citation information using the data available to them. Search for the article and then click Cited By in the search results. Google Scholar includes citations from an array of sources in its cited by calculation, including PowerPoints and Word documents. Google Scholar Citations is a service where you can set up a profile, keep track of web citations to your articles, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics.

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Once you set your institutional preferences, links to full-text, if available at Penn State, should appear.

Publish or Perish
is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search to obtain the raw citations, and then analyzes them

Other databases may include citation information. Once you locate the article you are interested in, look for links such as "Cited by" or "Items Citing this Item".

Citation Searching via Web of Science

Web of Science
Penn State users have access to the Web of Science for citation searching. The Web of Science indexes articles back to 1900.

Web of Science provides access to: the Science Citation Index Expanded 1900-present; the Social Sciences Citation Index 1956-present; and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index 1975-present. Web of Science indexes articles from thousands of journals and also indexes the citations used in those articles, thus allowing the user to see which papers have cited a core paper, and how many times a paper was cited in a given time period. Covers published content is almost every discipline.

Web of Science Cited Reference Searching
Step by step guide on citation searching

Step One

The system opens to Smart Search by default. Click on "Advanced Search" and then on "Cited References".

Step Two

In the Cited Author box, type in the author's name in the format lastname firstinitial* (e.g. federoff n*) and in the Cited Year box type in the year of the work. If the author is very prolific, or has a common name, you may have to input the name of the journal in the Cited Work box (find the correct abbreviation using the journal abbreviation list link). Click on the Search icon.

Step Three

Select the references you wish to include and click on See Results.

Note: Articles are often mis-cited in the literature, select all versions of the article to get a more complete picture.

Results

Note: The citations listed will only be from journals covered by the Web of Science database. Web of Science only indexes core journals. It does not cover other types of publications such as books, dissertations, technical reports, patents, etc. well.

You can also use the Analyze Results feature (located on the upper right) to determine trends in the citing set of articles.