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COMM 501: Proseminar in Mass Communications

Journal Info

Helen Smith's Citation and Journal Measures guide is a great resource for understanding how journal and citation metrics are calculated, as well as how to locate that information.

Open Access is a growing movement in academia, seeking to make the results of scholarly research more widely available. Penn State's Policy AC02 outlines the responsibilities of Penn State Researchers in making their publications available.

Citation Searching via Web of Science

Step One

Click on the down arrow next to the words "Basic Search" and select "Cited Reference Search"

 

Web of Science screen showing location of the cited reference search option.

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).

 

Web of Science screen showing the location of the cited author box and the cited year box.

Step Three

Select the references you wish to include and click on Finish Search.

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

 

Web of Science screen showing location of the check boxes to select references and the "finish search" button

Results

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

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

 

Web of Science screen showing results of a citation search with the location of the number of citations retrieved circled