LibGuides: Cited Reference Searching: Cited Reference Search

What is Citation Searching?

Citation searching, or using the references cited by authors, not only leads researchers to other relevant articles on their subject of interest, it can also indicate the importance of a piece of research.

The importance and "impact" of scholarly research articles are often measured by

the number of times a published paper has been cited
the ranking of the journal in which a paper is published
the acceptance rate of submitted articles to a journal

The library has access to several citation databases that have the capability of searching by cited references. Additional information on journal rankings and acceptance rates may be found on journal websites.

Open Access Citation Sources

Freely available databases sometimes provide citation counts. The most popular of these is Google Scholar:

Google Scholar
Introduces by Google in 2004. It includes books and journals from the vast network of the Internet. Has some advanced search features (date and publication). Years of coverage, sources, and ranking formulas are unknown. Google Scholar is updated several times a week.

Other free citation search software programs are:

CiteSeer
Developed by Pennsylvania State University. CiteSeer uses a focused web crawler to obtain citation data. Its scope is limited to computer and information science.
Publish or Perish
a free software program that analyzes data from Google Scholar. Publish or Perish has the same advantages and disadvantages as Google Scholar, with the added feature of deeper analysis.

What is Cited Reference Searching?

Cited reference searching allows you to:

search for records that cite a particular document (such as when you are reading an article and you want to search for a study mentioned in the literature review)
search by author, publication, title, date, and more

Remember: When searching for cited references, you are searching for what is listed in the citation, NOT what is in the documents themselves.

Where to start: For publications in the sciences, look in Web of Science (see tab under Cited References Searching) or Google Scholar

Citation Searching

Web of Science (Clarivate) This link opens in a new window
Web of Science is the recognized standard for citation searching. Over 12,000 high impact journals are included (10% of these are Elsevier publications) in 250 disciplines. Web of Science includes the Science Citation Index, the Social Science Citation Index, and Biosis. The power of the database is its archive for citation searching (back to 1965). See the nested tab for more information about how to search this database.

Other Databases that Offer Citation Searching

IEEE Xplore - IEEE/IET Electronic Library This link opens in a new window
Citation Searching is available as one of the "Other Options" on the IEEE home page and also as a tab on the Advanced Search screen
MathSciNet (AMS) This link opens in a new window
In MathSciNet, click on citations tab and get citation totals by author. MathSciNet covers books and journals.
OVID Journals (OVID) This link opens in a new window
For the nursing journals subscribed to through OVID there is a citation feature. After searching the author, click on "Find Citing Articles" link in the box on the right.
Psychology Database (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
Provides comprehensive coverage of psychology journals. The search screen has a cited reference tab.
ScienceDirect (Elsevier) This link opens in a new window
There is a References search type that provides the number of cited references for articles
SciFinder (CAS) This link opens in a new window
Cited and citing references are located int eh "Get Related Information" box
Wiley Online Library This link opens in a new window
From the advanced search screen for journals, References is one of the pull down selections of search types.

Scopus - UWF Libraries do not have a subscription to this fee based source from Elsevier. It is global in scope and aims to be the most comprehensive Scientific, Medical, Technical and Social Science abstract and citation database containing all relevant literature, regardless of form or type. It covers nearly 18,000 titles from more than 5,000 publishers.