Advanced Research: Citation Analysis

Citation analysis is a quantitative measurement that cannot give a full picture of a researcher or journal's scholarly impact.

For individuals, many factors may influence their citation rates and measurements, including:

• What format the researcher publishes in (books, journal articles, patents, white papers, etc.) The discipline of the researcher and its citation practices
• The type of publications produced (creative writing, review articles, book reviews, etc.)
• Whether self-citation is taken into consideration

For journals, additional considerations may affect the impact factor:

• Language of publication Type of articles published (letters to the editor, review articles, etc.)
• Publication schedule Number of articles published per year, especially changes in number of articles due to publication changes

Citation analysis should always be used with other quantitative and qualitative measures when evaluating the scholarly worth of a journal or researcher.

• No citation database is all inclusive. Citation databases do not track citations for every journal. Journals from some fields may be poorly represented and citation results will reflect this disparity between fields.
• Some disciplines have less extensive citation activity than others. Most research work in scientific fields attracts far more citations than does research in many humanities fields.
• Recent research may not be cited. The time lag or immediacy factor varies significantly in different fields. Some scientific fields experience rapid citation at the research front, while others take years for research to be noticed.
• Citation rates can be influenced by such factors as few authors citing one another or by an author's high rates of self-citation. Poor quality papers may have a high citation count because they are cited while being criticized or refuted. 
• Entries in citation databases may not be standard or follow a consistent name-authority scheme. Errors made by citing authors or by indexers may make it difficult to retrieve complete citation counts.
• Common authors' name forms are very difficult to separate from other similar names (especially in citation indexes that rely on initials instead of full names). Advances in indexing quality, however, have improved the identification of authors' identities. Searching by title of a work as opposed to author name is a sure way of avoiding this problem.

Google Scholar covers articles, theses, books, abstracts, court opinions, and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research, and may include pre-prints and web-published reports as well as published literature.  Since Google Scholar indexes information from multiple sources (provided by publishers, included in databases such as PubMed, found on the public web, etc.), there is no comprehensive list of what publications it covers.  However, for many fields, the greater number of publication formats included means that Google Scholar may find citations that were not discovered in Web of Science.

Start with a topic search in Google Scholar (shown above) for your topic, find an article that seems to answer a portion of your research question.  Now you can click on the authors to see if they have written more on this topic.  Each name under the title will take you to the Google Scholars author profile page which will list the other works found by Google.  Also, take advantage of the "Cited by" link that will take you to a list of articles that have cited this article.  Typically the larger the number the more foundationally important the article will be.

Web of Science is a citation index, which means that the records in the database contain information on citations made in that publication and it links that information so you can identify which publications have cited that one, and how many times a publication has been cited.

You can use citation searching to trace citations to a paper in order to find other papers related to it.