Citation Searching with Web of KnowledgeRoger Millsroger.mills@ouls.ox.ac.ukCatherine Dockertycatherine.dockerty@ouls.ox.ac.ukOULS Bio- and Environmental Sciences

These slides are available on http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser

Overview of Session• What is citation indexing• Why is it useful• How to use it on Web of Science• Citation searching on other products• 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!• Bibliometric analysis to be used in next research

assessment exercise (REF)

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 part of Web of Science, which

includes Social Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index, and also now Conference Proceedings

• 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; outside Oxford log in using SSO

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

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

Citation searching in Google Scholar• References include ‘cited by’ data based on articles known

to Google Scholar• Entries ranked by number of cites• Not possible to save sets or analyse• Still useful for tracking research

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/libraries/subjects/librarians