Life Sciences Library
408 Paterno Library
814-865-3706
Citation Searching allows you to:
Penn State users have access to the Web of Science for citation searching. The Web of Science indexes articles back to 1900.
Google Scholar also 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.
Other databases may include ctiation information. Once you locate the article you are interested in, look for links such as "Cited by" or "Items Citing this Item".
Go to the Web of Science database (Penn State users only).
Use the Cited Reference Search tab
In the Cited Author box , type in the author's name as format lastname firstinitial* (e.g. fedoroff n*) and in the Cited Year box, type in the year of the work. If the author is very prolific, 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).
See also this Cited Reference Searching video tutorial from Web of Science (6:56 minutes)
Select the references you wish to include and click on Finish Search.
Note: Articles are often mis-cited in the literature, select all appropriate versions of the article to get a more complete picture.
Note: The citations listed will only include those from journals covered by the Web of Science database. Web of Science only indexes core journals, 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 any trends in the citing set of articles.
The h-index1 measures both the scientific productivity and the apparent scientific impact of a specific scientist. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that those articles have received in other people's publications.
A scientist has index h if h of his or her number of published papers (Np) have at least h citations each and the other (Np – h) papers have ≤h citations each.
For example, an h-index of 20 means there are 20 papers that have 20 citations or more. This metric is useful because it discounts the disproportionate weight of highly cited papers or papers that have not yet been cited.
This calculation only includes items in the Web of Science database - books and articles in non-covered journals are not included.
Go to the Web of Science database (Penn State users only).
Do a simple search of the author's name, in format lastname firstinitial* (e.g. Fonash S*) with the index set to AUTHOR. If the author has a very common lastname, use both initials instead of first initial plus asterisk (e.g. Smith HF instead of Smith H*).
Click on Create Citation Report (this will take some time to calculate if the author has many articles).
The results will show several graphs (Published items in each year and Citations in each year) showing the latest 20 years of data. If more years of data are available, there will be a link to view a graph with all years. To the right of the graphs will be a summary of the results including the number of articles by the author, the total citations to those articles, the average citation per article and the H-index.
Under the graphs the author's articles will be listed, in descending times cited order, showing the number of citations to each article per year. The sort order of the articles can be changed to latest date, source, published year, etc. Only five columns of years are shown, but there are arrows to move through the years. Checkboxes beside the articles allow removal of individual items from the Citation Report or to restrict items by year.
You can print, email or save these citations. If emailed, the graphs do NOT appear, but the summary and the articles with their yearly cites are presented in a table. If saved, the results are saved as a simple text file. If printed, the fully formatted results with graphs are retained.
Journal Impact Factors are created from an analysis of the citation data in the Web of Science database. Theoretically, the higher the impact factor, the more prestigious the journal. Impact Factors are updated once a year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database.
The Impact Factor is calculated by dividing the number of citations to the journal in the JCR year, by the total number of articles published in the two previous years. An Impact Factor of 1.0 means that, on average, the articles published one or two years ago have been cited one time. An Impact Factor of 2.5 means that, on average, the articles published one or two years ago have been cited two and a half times. Citing articles may be from the same journal, or from different journals.
Go to the Journal Citation Reports database (Penn State users only)
Select either the Science edition or the Social Sciences edition. The Science Edition contains data about more than 8,000 journals in science and technology and the Social Sciences Edition contains data about more than 2,600 journals in the social sciences.
Also choose how you want to search for the data, by subject category or by journal name. Then click Submit.
For a title search, simply type in the full name of the journal.
For a subject category search, select a category from the drop down menu and choose how you want the data sorted (journal title, total cites, impact factor, immediacy index etc). Then click Submit.
For a subject category search, the default sort is by journal title. You can change the sort to
Total Cites- the raw number of citations to the journal in the JCR year.
Impact Factor - the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year.
Immediacy Index - the average number of times an article is cited in the year it is published
Current Articles - the total number of articles published in the journal in the JCR year.
Cited Half Life - The median age of the articles that were cited in the JCR year. Half of a journal's cited articles were published more recently than the cited half-life.
5 year impact factor - the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year.
Eigenfactor - the number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year,with highly cited journalsl influencing the network more than lesser cited journals. Eigenfactor Scores are not influenced by journal self-citation.
Article Influence - the average influence of a journal's articles over the first five years after publication.
A journal's Eigenfactor (EF) Score is a measure of the journal's importance to the scientific community. Eigenfactor scores are scaled so that the sum of the Eigenfactor scores of all journals listed in Thomson's Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is 100. In 2009, the journal Nature has the highest Eigenfactor score, with a score of 1.74605. The top thousand journals, as ranked by Eigenfactor score, all have Eigenfactor scores above 0.01.
Like the Impact Factor, the Eigenfactor Score is essentially a ratio of number of citations to total number of articles. However, unlike the Impact Factor, the Eigenfactor Score:
A journal's Article Influence (AI) score measures the average influence, per article, of the papers in a journal. As such, it is comparable to Thomson Scientific's widely-used Impact Factor. Article Influence scores are normalized so that the mean article in the entire Thomson Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database has an article influence of 1.00.
Go to Eigenfactor.
Choose Search by Journal Name if you want the measure for a specific journal and input the full journal name.
Choose Search by Discipline if you want a ranked listing of journals in a specific subject. Begin to type in the subject and choose the appropriate entry from the items suggested.
Choose Search by Year if you want a ranked listing of all journals in the database.
Results will have the EI and AI listed. Click on the entry for the journal to see graphs showing the changes in EI and AI scores over the last 15 years and the changes in the cost effectiveness of the journal over the last five years.
The Eigenfactor uses Thomson Reuters (ISI Web of Knowledge) citation data to compute EI and AI scores.
Check out Altmetrics.org - a web site dedicated to the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship.
Source-Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) is defined as the ratio of a journal’s citation count per paper and the citation potential in its subject field.1
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is a measure of scientific influence of scholarly journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of the journals where such citations come from.2 With SJR, the subject field, quality and reputation of the journal have a direct effect on the value of a citation.
1. H Moed. "Measuring contextual citation impact of scientific journals." Journal of Informetrics 4 (3): 265-277; July 2010. doi: 10.1016/j.joi.2010.01.002
2. Borja González-Pereira, Vicente P. Guerrero-Bote, Félix Moya-Anegón. "A new approach to the metric of journals’ scientific prestige: The SJR indicator" Journal of Informetrics 4 (3): 379-391; July 2010. doi: 10.1016/j.joi.2010.03.002.
Based on the Google Scholar database, these metrics list the h-index of a publication (rather than a researcher). One advantage of the Google Scholar data is that it includes is its inclusion of web repositories like the Social Science Research Network and arXiv. One disadvantage is that you cant see a title's ranking within a subject (unless all publicationss in that subject share a common keyword in their title). See the help page for more information.
From the Top 100 publications you can use the search box to find a journal or set of journals with a particular term in the titles, and clicking on the h-index for any specific publication opens up a page with details on the articles and citations statistics constituting its h-core.
Google Scholar also 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.
Journal Cost-Effectiveness uses data from ISI. Compiled by Ted Bergstrom and Preston McAfee this database records price per article, price per citation, and for-profit status of about 7000 academic journals in all disciplines, and classifies them as "good, medium, or bad buys".
