Fletcher Library at the West Campus
Your Research Impact:
Track Citations Through Library Databases and the Web
Lisa Kammerlocher, Tammy Allgood and Julie Tharp
| Learning Goals | Journal Rankings |
| Uses and Limitations of Citation Research | Trends in Scholarly Communication |
| Library Sources | ASU Libraries Knowledge Network |
| Web Search Engines |
Learning Goals
Participants will be able to
- describe the uses and limitations using citations to define his/her research impact.
- employ effective search strategies to track citations using Library databases and Web resources.
- describe at least two strategies for increasing an author's research impact.
Uses and Limitations of Citation Research
Uses:
- Enables authors in many fields to identify publications in which his/her research has been cited.
- Understanding how your research has been used by others to advance knowledge can be helpful in describing research impact.
- Government agencies, funding agencies, tenure and promotion committees and use citation data to evaluate the quality of a researcher's" record.
Limitations:
- Assumption: the more an author is cited, the greater the author's research impact. Citation analysis can overemphasize "the role of the particular journals indexed and devalues other forms of scholarly communication" (Cameron)
- Results are only as good as the database being queried. Journals representing some fields (ex. education) or emerging areas of research may not be adequately indexed by databases.
- You should take an extra step to find out HOW your research is being used within the publication to fully document your impact. ex. self citation
- ISI does not cover citations from books, most conference proceedings
- Citing errors
- New metrics are needed to address trends in scholarly publication and knowledge creation
Library Sources
Searching Hints:
- Search by first author and yourself
- Use truncation liberally - to capture mistakes by citing authors (for example, Einst*n, A*)
- Cast a broad net - search databases even when the disciplines indexed do not seem related
Steps:
- Find the citation representing your work
- Follow options for viewing those who have cited you
Web of Knowledge - Web of Science
Consists of three separate databases: Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts and Humanities Citation Index. Also includes Journal Citation Reports.
- cited reference search feature
- citation alerts
ASU Libraries is targeting December 2007 to make the new version of Web of Science available. Tutorials are available from ISI to assist you with citation and other types of searching.
Increasingly, other database vendors are providing a cited reference option. Examples include:
Academic Search Premier
Contains information from a range of academic areas, including business, social sciences, humanities, general academic, general science, education, and multiculturalism.
CSA Illumina - Cambridge Scientific Abstracts:
Includes databases from the humanities, social sciences and sciences.
Books:
Curious about the dissemination of your book? Then check WorldCat to see how many OCLC participant libraries own your book!
WorldCat (OCLC)
Books and other materials in libraries worldwide. Includes bibliographic records for any type of material cataloged by OCLC member libraries.
Important! Some disciiplines use monographs as their primary method of scholarly communication. Consequently, it is critical that you look at the bibliographies of books on your topic to see if you have been cited.
Web Search Engines
Use general search engines like Google and Yahoo to learn if your research has been listed in course syllabi, recommending reading lists, bibliographies or other pages.
Tip: Use more than one search engine to increase the potential number of available results relating to the impact of your scholarship.
Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search
Google
http://www.google.com/
Yahoo
http://www.yahoo.com/
Journal Rankings
eigenfactor.org "ranks the influence of journals much as Google’s PageRank algorithm ranks the influence of web pages [2]. By this approach, journals are considered to be influential if they are cited often by other influential journals."
Web of Knowledge - Journal Citation Reports
From ISI: Journal Citation Reports is a comprehensive and unique resource that allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from over 7,500 scholarly and technical journals from more than 3,300 publishers in over 60 countries. It is the only source of citation data on journals, and includes virtually all areas of science, technology, and social sciences. Journal Citation Reports can show you the:
- Most frequently cited journals in a field
- Highest impact journals in a field
- Largest journals in a field
Citation and article counts are important indicators of how frequently current researchers are using individual journals. By tabulating and aggregating citation and article counts, JCR offers a unique perspective for journal evaluation and comparison.
Trends in Scholarly Communication
New Measures of Scholarly Impact on the Horizon
Project MESUR
This project is exploring journal usage data to develop new metrics for understanding scholarly communication networks and impact.
Open Access and Universal Citation Databases
Citebase (a experimental Web resource for citation searching)
http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search
OpCit: The Open Citation Project - Reference Linking and Citation Analysis for Open Archives
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
Self-Archiving
Brody Tim, and Stevan Harnard. (2004) “Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals.” D-Lib Magazine, 10(6) accessed online at
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/harnad/06harnad.html
SelfArchiving FAQ - What Can Authors Do?
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#researcher/authors-do
ASU Libraries Knowledge Network
Faculty Publications & Research Archives - Still in Alpha stages. Allows for faculty to "opt in" to have their publications show in the ASU Directory.
Example of ASU Directory entry pulling data from the ASU Libraries Knowledge Network.
