Insights About Citation Reports
Create a Report
Identify all publications by the author(s) and add records to the database's saved list for easy access and retrieval.
View Report Within the Database
The citation reports within Scopus and Web of Science display citations by article and by year, with links to the citing articles. The report function will allow you to:
- Sort results by publication date, times cited, etc
- Identify trends over time
- View the h-index for the article set
- Exclude self-citations by the author from the report
- Number of citations and h-index are limited to citations indexed in the database
- Sort results and adjust date range to view highly-cited articles
- Follow links to view citing articles
- The export citation report feature within Scopus and Web of Science has limited options
Create Your Own Citation Report
Create report of publication and citation data for your own records or for grant or promotion applications. Always state the citation database you used and the date accessed:
- Use the saved list feature within the database to export the full record
- Select fields to include in the output, including "Times Cited"
- Reference management software e.g. "EndNote" can be used to create a report
- The quickest option is to use one citation database only e.g. "Scopus"
- Number of times cited is generally exported to the "Notes" or "Research Notes" field
- You may need to delete additional content in these notes fields
- Create or modify an "EndNote" output styles, to include citation counts
- The style may need to be adapted to meet the required reference/bibliographic format for a grant or promotion application
Why Create a Citation Report
A citation report is a collation of bibliographic details for the documents an individual has authored, along with the number of times those documents have been cited. This report may be used to support:
- Job applications
- Academic promotions
- Grant applications
- Academic credibility
The intended purpose of the report might influence what is included and how the information is presented.
Search for Citations
It is important to select the right tools to capture the majority of your research output. Note that citation databases tend to index journal articles only.
The number of citations:
- Includes only those articles indexed within the database
- Will vary depending on the database coverage e.g. sources, date range
Search for Documents Indexed Within a Database
Search by the title and author name(s) to locate a specific article. The author name plus subject, institution and/or publication years will find all articles by an author.
The number of citations:
- Includes only those articles indexed within the database
- Will vary depending on the database coverage e.g. sources, date range
- Use truncation e.g. SMITH J* will retrieve SMITH J, SMITH JS etc
- Identify all author affiliations
- Some databases automatically group documents by the same author
- Be aware they may not include all documents by the author
Search for Non-indexed Documents
If you cannot find the document using the standard search, there are alternative search options within the databases to find citation information.
These search options include:
- Web of Science's Cited Reference Search
- Scopus's Secondary documents and Web results
- Google Scholar/Publish or Perish
- Can locate citations to books and book chapters, and other types of material
- Will also capture misspellings and incomplete or incorrectly cited works
- Always verify any citations located using Google Scholar
Search for Books and Book Chapters
Books are not traditionally indexed in databases and may be less frequently cited. To measure the impact of books and similar publications, look at how they have been received.
This might include:
- Book reviews, noting the author and where it has been published
- Library holdings in WorldCat and Library of Congress (US) or other National libraries
- Usage in curriculum e.g. as core or recommended text in University courses
- Also consider following instructions above for non-indexed documents
- For book reviews, the author who wrote the review, and where the review was published can be more important than whether the review was good or bad
- When looking at library holdings, it might be worthwhile separating the Local and international holdings
