Citation Searching with Web of KnowledgeRoger MillsOULS Bio- and Environmental Sciences Librarian

Overview of Session• What is citation indexing• Why is it useful• How to use it on Web of Science• Citation searching on other products• Getting full text, setting up alerts and organising your

references with RefWorks or EndNote

Citation indexing• Invented in 1961 by Eugene Garfield at the Institute for

Scientific Information (ISI)• Scientific abstracting/indexing services began in nineteenth

century, recording author/title/publisher/source etc for articles and indexing them

• Garfield added details of all references quoted in the article and indexed them too, publishing results as Science Citation Index (SCI) – originally only in printed form

• Allowed for many new ways of linking articles

Exciting new ways• For an article you’ve read:• Find earlier articles that one was based on• Find later articles which quoted it• Find related articles which quote some of the same

references as this one• So you can trace the progress of ideas backwards,

sideways and, uniquely, forwards in time

And• You can identify which journals publish most highly-cited

articles – the notorious ‘impact factor’• Publishing your work in high-impact journals is important in

getting funding!

also• Discover who is citing your research, or that of a colleague,

or noted authority• Identify sources of information that competitors are

consulting for their research• Construct an objective history of a field of study, significant

invention, or discovery

Originally• Using the paper Science Citation Index was hard work• Now, the electronic version is much quicker to use• But can be complex and confusing – important to

understand what it does and doesn’t do• Caveat emptor!• SCI now has competitors, but all work slightly differently –

e.g. Scopus, Google Scholar• The basic concept of linking documents which cite each

other, and ranking them according to the frequency with which they do so, underpins search engines like Google

Want to know more?• Wikipedia is a good source – try

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_index

In the real world• Science Citation Index is now part of Web of Science,

which includes Social Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index

• Web of Science is a product offered on the platform Web of Knowledge (WoK), alongside other products including Journal Citation Reports which gives journal impact factors.

• Direct access available on Oxford network: use Athens password outside Oxford

• Athens registration: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/athens/

Cited Reference Search

Sample search

Times cited = citing articles

Cited references

Find related records

Related References• Moves your research laterally• Displays a list of articles whose cited reference lists include

at least one of the sources cited by the original (parent) article

• Ranked by the number of shared references; those sharing the most references are displayed first

• Excellent for retrieving lots of results, but will require some sorting to weed out irrelevant articles

Citation Alerts• Use this feature to register your interest in particular

article(s)• You will then receive an email every time any of those

articles is cited by a new addition to the database• One you have located an article you want to add to your

list, click on the Create Citation Alert button• You can review your list by choosing View My Cited

Articles List from the WoK homepage

Citation alerts – register first

Export to Reference Software

EndNote Web Library

Analyzing results

Journal Citation Reports (JCR)• For Sciences and Social Sciences• This is a measure of the frequency with which the "average

article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The impact factor will help you evaluate a journal's relative importance, especially when you compare it to others in the same field

• From within a record you can click on Journal Citation Reports to view the impact factor of the journal

• Or you can view and compare impact factors of all journals within your subject area

JCR

Journal search on JCR

Impact factor for the journal “Ann Rev Biochem”

ISI Highlycited.com• Allows you to search for a specific researcher and see how

highly cited their work is• Use the View Publications List button to see details of their

published works, and of articles citing them• Keep in mind that this feature is quite new and only 250

authors are included fopr each of 21 subject areas

Search for Dwek – not there!

Sir John Krebs - present

Other services offering citation searching - SCOPUS

• Sciences and Social Sciences• Results include journal articles and web pages• Each reference to a paper shows the number of times an

article has been cited

Sample Search in Scopus

Citation searching• Is very useful• Should be used with care• Excellent for keeping up with new articles and people• Bibliometrics is an art not a science!

• For further help contact your subject librarian – see http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/collections/librarians