Bibliometrics: Sources for Tracking Citations
Key Databases for Citation Tracking
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SCOPUSA multidisciplinary database that covers approx 23,000 journals.
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Web of ScienceIncludes the Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index.
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Dimensions (Digital Science)A multidisciplinary source that includes citation data from CrossRef, the field and relative citation ratios, and other indicators from Altmetric.
What is Scopus?
Scopus is a database for scientific, technical, and medical information, with some limited AHSS content. It indexes 23,000 journals from over 5,000 publishers, and approx 150,000 books and selected book series.
It can be accessed by UCD staff & students through the Library's subscription.
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ScopusScopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, features smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research.
Caveats & Limitations:
- Citation counts are not complete. Only citations to and from publications covered by Scopus (approx 22,000 journals, 150,000 books) are tracked.
- Coverage is more comprehensive for some subjects (sciences, engineering, medicine) than for others (social sciences and humanities).
- Secondary sources are not covered as part of the Scopus database. They are references cited by the articles that are covered by Scopus and are not included in most counts or analyses.
What is Web of Science?
The Web of Science database comprises the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Science Citation Index Expanded, and extracts the citation information from the articles. It also includes the newer Emerging Sources Citation Index.
Web of Science is only available through UCD Library's paid subscription:
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Web of ScienceIncludes the Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index.
Caveats & Limitations:
A citation search in Web of Science is not a complete citation search:
- Only citations to and from approx 10,000 source journals are counted.
- Subjects are not covered evenly by date; e.g. citation data for science journals generally goes back further than arts and social sciences.
- Some subject areas are poorly covered, particularly across arts and humanities, and the social sciences.
What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar consists mainly of scholarly material including journal papers, conference papers, technical reports, theses, pre-prints, post-prints, abstracts and court opinions. Google Scholar also automatically includes scholarly works from Google Book Search.
Google Scholar's strength is the broad scope of content for both types of publications and disciplines. There is also generally better international and non-English language coverage.
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Publish or Perish - PoPPoP is a freely available, downloadable software providing enhanced analysis of Google Scholar citation data. It also provides for various sorting (e.g. by author, publication and publisher) and download options (e.g. to Excel).
Caveats & Limitations:
- Limited search features & data quality is sometimes poor
- Variation in how the item is cited can result in duplicate records for the same publication
- Unknown which sources are indexed and over what time period
Additional Databases for Citation Tracking
Other publishers or subject databases offer citation tracking as well. Below is a list of such databases that are either free or available to UCD staff and students through the Library's subscription.
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ACM Digital LibraryThe Digital Library is the full-text repository of papers published by the Association for Computing Machinery and by other publishers that have co-publishing or co-marketing agreements with ACM. This includes over 60 years of ACM archives.
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CiteSeerX Beta- Free
- Includes journal articles in computer and information science.
- Search for a particular work or author. Select the desired work, then click on the number following Citations. Also see Years of Citing Articles at the right-hand side of the page to see citations across time.
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EBSCOhost databasesA platform hosting a number of research databases.
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IEEE XploreIEEE Xplore is an online delivery system providing full text access to the world's highest quality technical literature in electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics.
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MathSciNetMathSciNet is a comprehensive database covering the world's mathematical literature of the past 61 years.
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ScienceDirect JournalsScienceDirect contains over 25% of the world's science, technology and medicine full text and bibliographic information. Includes online eBooks, reference works, handbooks, book series, journal titles and backfiles.
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SciFinder Scholar (CAS)This resource gives access to the electronic version of Chemical Abstracts.