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Cited Reference Searching

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:

Other free citation search software programs are:

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

Other Databases that Offer Citation Searching

  • 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.