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Faculty Scholarship and Research Support

Use this guide to learn how to do cited reference searching to find out how often you have been cited and by whom. Tips are also shared on how to identify the best publication for your research and ways to share your scholarship.

Tracking citations

In this guide we give you the tools to help you manage your research, your research identity and track your citations. Please remember that the numbers are not absolute and you need to take the time to go beyond the surface. It is important to use both quantitative/qualitative measures. 

First Steps....

  • To begin the process of identifying who has cited your work, you must have a complete and accurate record of all your publications (including co-authors).  
  • Remember: No single database has all the information you need. You will need to consult multiple resources.  
  • Registering for a free ORCID (or other similar ID, e.g. ISNI that is used by creative artists, for a charge, including artists, writers, producers, performers, etc.) provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher regardless of variation in name forms. It connects your manuscript and grant submissions while supporting automated linkages between you and your professional activities, ensuring that your work is recognized.

This is an attempt to give you some of tools available, but if you find one that you like, please let us know!

For more information, consult: http://zu.libguides.com/orcid

Main Citation Resources

  • Google Scholar  lets you track citations to your publications over time.

  • Scopus data comes from CiteScore, SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper), SJR (SCImago Journal Rank), citation- and document- counts and percentage cited. The integration of these metrics into Scopus provides insights into the citation impact journal titles.

  • ​Cabell's Directories is used used for finding a particular journal's acceptance rate, which is a measure of the journal's quality. It includes predatory reports 

Google Scholar Overview

The citation information in Google Scholar is extracted from scholarly journal articles within the Scholar database and does not include patents, books, dissertations and Court opinions. 

How to Find Citation Counts via Google Scholar and "Who is Citing Whom"

  1. Go to Google Scholar.
  2. Enter the appropriate search terms for the item under study.  Enter just enough information to find what you need - do not fill in the complete search form.    
  3. Click on the Search Scholar button.
  4. Locate the correct article in the search results list.
  5. If the article was cited by others, you will see a "Cited by" link at the bottom of the record. Click this link to view who has cited this item. 

For more information about searching see Google Scholar's Help pages.

Be aware:

  • Google Scholar does not index all scholarly articles; therefore, some articles citing the item under study may not be counted.
  • Author names can be tricky to search and the results can vary greatly depending on how the name is entered; we recommend searching only the author's last name and combining that with the main title in quotations.
  • Variants in how the item is cited can result in more than one entry for the item under study. To overcome this shortcoming, create an account with ORCID to make sure all your publications are accounted for
  • The term "citation" in brackets [CITATION] at the beginning of an entry, indicates that the full text of the item is not accessible through Google Scholar. 

The Google Scholar Citation Blog contains more information and discussion on the use & metrics of Google Scholar

Scopus Overview

Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer reviewed research literature in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and the arts & humanities.  It is updated daily and includes over 21,000 titles from over 5,000 international publishers.  It also contains over 5 million conference papers and "Articles-in-Press" from almost 4000 journals and publishers.  Full coverage begins in 1996.

Journal Metrics in Scopus: Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)

The SNIP indicator measures the average citation impact of the publications of a journal. More information is available from the source at http://www.journalindicators.com/

Other Databases with citation data

Zayed University subscribes to the following databases that contain citation data.  

EBSCO Host databases have several options that you can utilize when tracking citations.  Your choices will vary depending on the database you are searching.  Some of the options include:

1. Find Similar Results

2. Cited References

3. Citation Matcher

Cited References:  This option is available  from both the result list and the full records.(NOTE: only available for some articles, results will vary!).

Times Cited in this database--This option is available from both the results list and full record (Note: only available for some articles, results will vary!).

 

Proquest Databases recently added the ability to search for Cited References. This feature covers scholarly journals from 2007 (Note: a few go back to 2003).  Dissertations are covered beginning in 2008.  Choose "Author-AU" from the drop down menu.  Once the selection is made, the "Look up Authors" link appears.  If you are just looking for citations for articles , you can limit the search to  scholarly  journals (Note: Peer Reviewed is an option).

Hint: In searching the author's name it is best to leave the default at "Contains"

If the article has been cited by other documents in the Proquest databases, Cited by (#) will appear below the citation.

Clicking on this link will produce a list of records.